 CHAPTER 11 THE REBELLION OF THE RITCH Sir Thomas Moore, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes in which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as a hero of the new learning, that great dawn of a more rational daylight which, for so many, made medievalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no dispute about his appreciation of the Renaissance. He was, above all things, a humanist, and a very human one. He was, even in many ways, very modern, which some, rather erroneously suppose, to be the same as being human. He was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or rather perhaps a fanciful social system with something of the ingenuity of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially, with much more than the flippancy attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to discharge the utopian notions upon his morality, but their subjects and suggestions mark what, for want of a better word, we can only call his modernism. Thus the immortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savers of evolution, and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriage might be taken quite seriously by the students of eugenics. He suggested a sort of pacifism, though the utopians had a quaint way of achieving it. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of many evil abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism was too narrow rather than too broad for him, if he was obviously not a Protestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him the name of a reformer. But he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern minds and theology. He was partly what we should call a neo-pagan. His friend Collette summed up that escape from medievalism which might be called passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debates they are lumped together, but Greek learning was the gross of this time. There had always been a popular Latin, if a dog Latin, he would be nearer the truth to call the many evils bilingual than to call their Latin a dead language. Greek never of course became so general a possession, but for the man who got it it is not too much to say that he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this Greek spirit was reflected in more. Its universality, its urbanity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected this planted intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages. We can imagine him thinking Gargoyle's Gothic in the sense of barbaric, or even failing to be stirred as Sidney was by the trumpet of Chevy Chase. The wealth of the ancient heathen world in wit, loveliness and civic heroism had so recently been revealed to that generation in its dazzling perfusion and perfection that it might seem a trifle if they did not hear and there an injustice to the relics of the Dark Ages. When therefore we look at the world with the eyes of more we are looking from the widest windows of that time, looking over an English landscape seen for the first time very equally in the level light of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of the Renaissance, England passing from the medieval to the modern. Thus he looked forth and saw many things, and said many things, and many witty, but he noticed one thing which is at once a horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over that landscape said, sheep are eating men. This singular summary of the great epic of our emancipation and enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such very curt historical accounts of it. It is nothing to do with the translation of the Bible or the character of Henry VIII or the characters of Henry VIII's wives or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther and the Pope. It was not Pope's sheep who were eating Protestant men or vice versa, nor did Henry at any period of his own brief and rather bewildering papacy have more martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had them eaten by lions. What was meant of course by this picturesque expression was that an intensive type of agriculture was giving way to a very extensive type of pasture. Great spaces of England which had hid the tubing cut up into the commonwealth of a number of farmers were being laid under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has been put by a touch of epigram rather in the matter of more himself by Mr. J. Stephen in a striking essay now I think only to be found in the back files of the new witness. He enunciated the paradox that the very much admired individual who made two blades of grass grow instead of one was a murderer. In the same article Mr. Stephen traced the true moral origins of this movement which led to the growing of so much grass and the murder or at any rate the destruction of so much humanity. He traced it and every true record of that transformation traces it to the growth of a new refinement in a sense more rational refinement in the governing class. In mid-evil Lord had been by comparison a course fellow. He had merely lived in the largest kind of farmhouse after the fashion of the largest kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could but he was quite ready to drink ale and science had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than this one of the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she cannot come to him because her carriage horses are pulling the flower. In the true middle ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered but in the time of Henry VIII the transformation was beginning. In the next generation a phrase was common which is one of the keys of the time and is very much the key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that great Lord was said to be Italianate. It meant subtler shapes of beauty, delicate inductile glass, gold and silver, not treated as barbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty. It meant the perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things. Whether it was the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscious art, especially into unnecessary things, luxury was made alive with a soul. We must remember this real thirst for beauty for it is an explanation and an excuse. The old barony had indeed been thinned by the civil wars that closed at Bosworth and curtailed by the economical and crafty policy of that unkingly king Henry VII. He was himself a new man, but we shall see the barons largely give place to a whole nobility of new men. But even the older families already had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them, the Howards for instance, may be said to have figured both as old and new families. In any case, the spirit of the whole upper class can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy, which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise which is now almost universally regarded as very high praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud of their ancestors. It can be truly said that English aristocrats have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants, they plant huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth. For their descendants, they fought for a higher and higher place in the government of the state. For their descendants, above all, they nourished every new science or scheme of social philosophy. They seized the vast economic chances of pastureage, but they also drained the fens. They swept away the priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As the new Tudor House passes through its generations, a new and more rationalist civilization is being made. Scholars are criticizing authentic texts. Skeptics are discrediting not only poppish saints, but pagan philosophers, specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men. You've seen that in the 14th century in England there was real revolution of the people. It very nearly succeeded, and I need not conceal the conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for all of us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II had really sprung into the saddle of Watt Tyler, or rather if his parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of the new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority as it was already common to confirm the fact of the trade unions by the form of royal charter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is possible to human nature. The renaissance when it came would have come as a popular education, and not the culture of a club of aesthetics. The new learning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the old days of medieval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school of Selene might have been, but the highest grade of the craft of a guild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen on wooden stages, set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finer fulfillment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The players need not have been the king's servants, but their own masters. The great renaissance might have been liberal with its liberal education. If this be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved. The medieval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for anyone to show that it needed to have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal parliament prevailed and pushed back the peasants at least into their dubious and half-developed status. More than this it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisive events afterward. When Henry VIII came to the throne the guilds were perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants had probably regained ground. Many were still theoretically serfs, but largely under the easy landlordism of the Abbotts. The medieval system still stood. It might for all we know have begun to grow again, but all sys-speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a counter-revolution, a successful revolution of the rich. The apparent pivot of it was in certain events political and even personal. They roughly resolved themselves into two, the marriages of Henry VIII and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry VIII have long been a popular and even a stale joke, and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. The jocular thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quite a glorious picture of the young prince of the Renaissance, radiant with all the new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a maniac, no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear it was rather the fear of a mad dog than of a watchdog. In this change doubtless the inconsistency and even the ignominy of his blue-beard weddings played a great part. And it is but just to him to say that perhaps with the exception of the first and the last he was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair of the first divorce that broke the back of his honor and incidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable and universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize that he did not regard himself as the enemy, but rather as the friend of the Pope. There was a shadow of the old story of Beckett. He had defended the pope in diplomacy and the church in controversy, and when he wearied of his 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 cynical concessions, might very well be made to him by a friend. But it is part of that high inconsistency, which is the fate of the Christian faith in human hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it will really be uppermost, if only for an instant, and that the worst ages of the church will not do or say something as if by accident that is worthy of the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon the cushions 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 of anger, dissolved all the old relations with the papacy. It is probable that he did not clearly know how much he was doing then, and it is very geniable that we do not know it now. He certainly did not think he was anti-Catholic, and in one rather ridiculous sense we can hardly say he thought he was anti-papal, since he apparently thought he was pope. On this day really dates something that played a certain part in history, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widely different from many evil one. It is a matter which further embarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catholic things and Anglicanism, for it was a new note, and yet one struck by the older party. The supremacy of the king over the English national church was not unfortunately merely a fad of the king, but became partly and for one period a fad of the church. But apart from all controverted questions there is at least the human and historic sense, in which the continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not only cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he cuts off England from England. The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held the scales between the Empire and the French monarchy, and made the modern balance of power in Europe. Wolsey is often described under the dictum of ego et rex meas, but he marks a stage in the English story, rather because he suffered for it than because he said it. Ego et rex meas might be the motto of any modern prime minister, for we have forgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was simply dismissed. The mark of a monarchy still eb salute. The English were amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like a butler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman. It struck down the noblest of the humanists, Thomas More, who seemed sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint under dietylation. He died gloriously jesting, and the death has naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred saviours of his soul, his tenderness, his trust in the truth of God. But for humanism, it must have seemed a monster's sacrifice. It was somehow as if Montaigne were a martyr. And that is indeed the note, something truly to be called unnatural, had already entered the naturalism of the Renaissance, and the soul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun, saying, I shall be above that fellow, with Franciscan familiarity, which can love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his king the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only on his wrath. But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, is the more clearly defined and less clotted with controversies in the second of the two parts of Henry's policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries, but it is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true that the church, by the Renaissance period, had reached a considerable corruption. The real proofs of it are utterly different both from the contemporary despotic pretense and from the common protestant story. It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life. Violent as they often are, they cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St. Paul to the purists and most primitive churches. The apostle was there writing to those early Christians whom all churches idealize, and he talks to them as to cutthroats and thieves. The explanation for those concerned for such subtleties may possibly be found in the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters have been written in all centuries, and even in the sixteenth century they do not prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were good bishops. Moreover, even those who professed that the monks were plufflegates dare not profess that they were oppressors. There is a truth, in Cabba's point, that where monks were landlords they did not become rack-renting landlords and could not become absentee landlords. Nevertheless there was a weakness in the good institutions, as well as a mere strength in the bad ones, and that weakness partakes of the worst element of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always a touch of betrayal from within, and the abbots were destroyed more easily because they did not stand together. They did not stand together because the spirit of the age, which is very often the worst enemy of the age, was the increasing division between rich and poor, and it had partly divided even the rich and poor clergy, and the betrayal came as it nearly always comes from that servant of Christ who holds the bag. To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers or even the great hotel proprietors and pointing out the uselessness of a litter of little public houses. That is what the Tudor politicians did first with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great houses and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lords did not resist, or at any rate did not resist enough, and the sack of their religious houses began. But if the Lord abbots acted for a moment as lords that could not excuse them in the eyes of much greater lords for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of the rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences which had told only to the advantage of the poor, and they were soon to learn that it was no epic for their easy rule and their careless hospitality. The great houses now isolated, with themselves brought down one by one, and the beggar, whom the monastery had served as a sort of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and founded a ruin. For a new and wide philosophy was in the world which still rules our society. By this creed most of the mystical virtues of the old monks have simply been turned into great sins, and the greatest of these is charity. But the populace which had risen under Richard II was not yet disarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of Beau and Bill, and organized into local groups of town and guild and manor. Over half the counties of England the people rose and fought one final battle for the vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the new charity, a dirty fellow named Thomas Cromwell, was especially singled out as the tyrant, and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The popular movement was put down partly by force, and there is the new note of modern militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynical professional troops actually brought in from foreign countries who destroyed English religion for hire. But like the old popular rising it was even more put down by fraud. Like the old rising it was sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parlay, and the government had to resort to the simple expedient of calming the people with promises and then proceeding to break first the promises and then the people. This is the fashion made familiar to us by the modern politicians and their attitudes toward the great strikes. The revolt bore the name of pilgrimage of grace, and its program was practically the restoration of the old religion. In connection with the fancy about the fate of England, if Tyler triumphed it proves, I think, one thing, that his triumph, while it might or might not have led to something that could be called a reform, would have rendered quite impossible everything that we now know as the reformation. The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an inquisition of the blackest and most unbearable sword. Historians who have no shadow of sympathy with the old religion are agreed that it was uprooted by means more horrible than have ever perhaps been employed in England before or since. It was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous by spies. The spoilation of the monasteries especially was carried out not only with a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for which there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane had returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of the king's personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the conspiracy with new brutalities toward Protestants. But such reaction as there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful favor and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly for being simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the king. It culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story told on an earlier page, where the despot revenged himself on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste to the most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once ridden singing because it was also the shrine where King Henry had knelt to repent. For three centuries the church and the people had called Beckett a saint. When Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor, this might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy, and yet it was not really so. For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that still strangers something of which we have perhaps fensively found hints before in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages, and whether or no his failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the dyke of the ancient doctrines led him a flood that may almost be said to have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died. For the drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own character. We input the matter most practically by saying that it is unpractical to discuss whether Froud finds any justification for Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For whether or no it was desired it was not created. Least of all our princes did the Tudors leave behind them, a secure central government. And the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or two generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years afterwards his history goes. The relations of the crown and the new servants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world. And the acts which had been sanctified with the blood of Moore and soiled with the blood of Cromwell was at the signal of one of that slave's own descendants to fall and kill an English king. The tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the king as well as the church was the revolt of the rich and especially of the new rich. They used the king's name and could not have prevailed without his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they had plundered the king after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazing little of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing, actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased no doubt by the fact that Edward VI succeeded to the throne as a mere boy. But the deeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line between the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family and thus providing himself for the son, Henry had also provided the country with a very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, even though he would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibal protectors. We talk of the disillusion of the monasteries, but what occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lackeys and money lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names, when they did not change them, became the names of the great dutes and marquis of our own day. But if we look back and forth in our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred when the armed men of the Seymours and their sword passed from the sacking of the monasteries to the sacking of the guilds. The medieval trade unions were struck down, their buildings were broken into by the soldiery, and their funds seized by the nunnoability, and this simple incident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion, in itself plausible enough, that the guilds like everything else at the time were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing, and it may be true that Caesar was not feeling well on the morning of the Ides of March. But simply to say that the guilds declined is about as true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at the foot of the statue of Pompeii. CHAPTER XI This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A SHORT HISTORY OF INGLAND by G. K. Chesterton CHAPTER XII Spain and the Schism of Nations The revolution that arose out of what is called a renaissance, and ended up in some countries in what is called a reformation, and in the internal politics of England, one drastic and definite thing, that thing was destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not the only thing it did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of all the problems now connected with capital and labour. How much the theological theories of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter for difference of opinion. Neither party, if educated about the facts, will deny that the same time and temper, which produced the religious schism, also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme Protestant will probably be content to say that Protestantism was not the motive but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will probably be content to admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but rather the punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not complete, indeed until the end of the 18th century, when Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and last of a near on paganism, that the thing began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the noblest of the renaissance, and ended in the Hellfire Club. Anyhow what was first founded at the Reformation was a new and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed in an ever increasing degree was everything that could be held directly or indirectly by the people in spite of such an aristocracy. This fact has filled all the subsequent history of our country, but the next particular point in that history concerns the position of the crown. The king in reality had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers who had crowded behind him just before the bursting of the door. The king is left behind in the rush for wealth and already can do nothing alone, and of this fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward VI, affords a very arresting proof. Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Catherine, has a bad name even in popular history, and popular prejudice is generally more worthy of study than scholarly sophistry. Her enemies were indeed largely wrong about her character, but they were not wrong about her effect. She was in the limited sense a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather morbid, but it is true that she was a bad queen, bad for many things, but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true, when all is said, that she set herself to burn out no potpourri, and managed to burn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty, especially its concentration in particular places and in a short time, did remain like something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of the series of great historical accidents that separated a real, if not universal, public opinion from the old regime. It has been summarized in the death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford. For one of them, at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more robust and human type, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob and coward in the Council of Henry VIII as to make Thomas Cromwell seem by comparison a man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, the saner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the time even the Oxford martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion than the massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts whose very ignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it really was. But this last, ugly feature was brought into sharper relief and produced more conscious or unconscious bitterness because of the other great fact of which I spoke above, which is the determining test of this time of transition. What made all the difference was this, that even in this Catholic reign the property of the Catholic Church could not be restored. The very fact that Mary was a fanatic, and yet this act of justice was beyond the wildest dreams of fanaticism, that is the point. The very fact that she was angry enough to commit wrongs for the Church and yet not bold enough to ask for the rights of the Church, that is the test of the time. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not allowed to deprive great men of their property, or rather of other people's property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had not gone to church and sparing men who had gone there to steal the Church ornaments. What forced her into it? Not certainly her own religious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere, not public opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religious humanities which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanities which she did. The force came of course from the new nobility and the new wealth they refused to surrender, and the success of this earthly pressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the crown. The scepter had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a treasure-house, and it was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow. There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the story of Mary having Calais written on her heart, when the last relic of the medieval contests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic half virtue of the tutors. She was a patriot. But patriots are often pathetically behind the times, for the very fact that they dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation, Cromwell exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the jingles of fashota kept it on France when they ought already to have had it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position toward the most tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the coincidences that confirmed the 16th century change, and the name of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen she married a Spanish prince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was more cut off from the old religion, though very tenuously attached to the new one, and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured, which was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman, standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt falling across him the shadow of a tall ship. Wooden cliches about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England in some imperial fashion now first realized that she was great. It would be far truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great poet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only as small like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled until the 18th century, and even when it came, was far less vivid and vital than what came in the 16th. What came then was not imperialism, it was anti-imperialism. England achieved at the beginning of her modern history that one thing human imagination will always find heroic. The story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was to her what Benakburn was to the Scots or Majuba to the Boers, a victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only when we realize that the English were by comparison as dingy, as undeveloped, as petty, and provincial as Boers that we can appreciate the height of their defiance or the splendor of their escape. We can only grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of the Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate. Logically, it is hard to see what else he could say, having declared her mother's marriage invalid, but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering England from the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers who had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in the South simply as pirates, and technically the description was true. Only technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judged with some generous weakness. Then as if to stamp the contrast in an imperishable image, Spain or rather the empire with Spain for its center put forth all its strength and seemed to cover the sea with a navy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It poured down on the doomed island with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgment. Sailors or pirates struck at it with small ships, staggering under large cannon. Fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island, and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness and abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched the nerve that has never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopeless hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope. The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small thing which escaped would survive the greatness, and yet there is truly a sense in which we may never be so small or so great again. For the splendor of the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as a sunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it as the end of the Renaissance or the end of the old medieval civilization, no candid critic can deny that its chief glories ended with it. Let the reader ask himself what strikes him specially in Elizabethan magnificence, and he will generally find it in something of which there were at least traces in medieval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. The Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies. Its tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to say that the chief tragedy was the cutting shorts of the comedy, for the comedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both foreign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being humorous, but not in the sense of being happy. You may be noted that the givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearean love stories nearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, often embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the Virgin Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruities with the course and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Their critics might indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true Virgin for a false one, but 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 a whole procession of Virgin Queens, and it is certain that the medieval would have understood much better than the moderns the modernum of measure for measure. And as with the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen, the mystical monarchy glorified in Richard II was soon to be dethroned much more runeously than in Richard II. The same Puritans who tore off the pace-bored crowns of the stage-players were also to tear off the real crowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummary was to be forbidden, and all monarchy to be called mummary. Peter died upon St. George's Day, and much of what St. George had meant died with him. I do not mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or of England died. That remained, and even rose steadily, to be the noblest pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had been involved in that image of St. George, to whom the Lionheart had dedicated England long ago, in the deserts of Palestine. The conception of patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages in one very unique and as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism. The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by 70 times seven in the patrons of towns, trades, and social types, but the very idea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimate rivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The guild of the shoemakers and the guild of the skinners carrying the badges of St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew might fight each other in the streets, but they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fighting each other in the skies. Similarly, the English would cry and battle on St. George and the French hunt St. Dennis, but they did not seriously believe that St. George hated St. Dennis, or even those who cried upon St. Dennis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism, what many modern people would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what most modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious schism, it cannot be denied a deeper and more inhuman division appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints who were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods who were themselves at war, that the great Spanish ships were named after St. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the New England. Soon it was to mean something almost cosmically conflicting as if they were named after Baell or Thor. These are indeed mere symbols, but the process of which they are symbols was very practical and must be seriously followed. They're entered with the religious wars, the idea which modern science applies to racial wars, the idea of natural wars, not arising from a special quarrel, but from the nature of the people quarreling. The shadow of racial fatalism first fell across our path and far away in distance and darkness, something moved that men had almost forgotten. Beyond the frontiers of the fading empire lay that Outerland as loose and drifting as a sea which had boiled over in the barbarian wars, most of it was now formally Christian but barely civilized. A faint awe of the culture of the south and the west lay on its wild forces like a light frost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep, but it had begun to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth the great man who with all his violence was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in his sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs, but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian scheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild doctrines in the old wild lands had sucked central Europe into a cyclic war of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old religion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. The continental conditions were indeed complicated and grew more and more complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They were complicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in the full modern sense, to stand free and for square from all combinations, a purpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to give diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad simply because it preserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation of Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of Calvinistic and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical and defiant defending its own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we should be right if we see the first throws of the modern international problems in what is called the Thirty Years' War, whether we call it the revolt of the Half-Heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the North. Sweden took a hand in the struggle and sent a military hero to the help of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere exhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complex strategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to the northeast in a sterile land defends a small ambitious family of moneylenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly selfish, rather thinly adopted theories of Luther and began to lend their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They were well paid for it by step after step of promotion, but at this time their principality was only the old mark of Brandenburg. Their name was Hohenzolleran. CHAPTER XIII The Age of the Puritans We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such as snark or boujum were systematically substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects in dispute. If we were told that a king was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering the boujum, or that a mob was roused of fury by the public exhibition of a boujum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while deferring to the fashionable distaste for theology in this generation, or rather in the last generation. Thus the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for what they thought was pure religion. Eventually they wanted to impose it on others. Sometimes they only wanted to be free to practice it themselves. But in no case can justice be done to what was finest in their characters as well as first in their thoughts if we never by any chance ask what it was they wanted to impose or practice. Now there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with indifference or more often detested with frenzy, such as religious liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood and are even undervalued in their logical case for the things they really did care about, such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate. In novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We're interested in everything about them except the only thing in which they were interested at all. We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in England were simply an excuse for plutocratic pillage, and that is the only truth to be told about the manner. But it was far otherwise with the individuals a generation or two after to whom the wreck of the Armada was already a legend of national deliverance from propry, as miraculous and almost as remote as the deliverance of which they read so realistically in the Hebrew books now lay open to them. The August accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well with their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier hold upon the Germans. It is by such things that civilized state may fall from being a Christian nation to being a chosen people. But even if their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous to the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last the Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had market superiority over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first but one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the church and were proceeding to despoil the crown. But while they were all merely the creatures of the great spoiltion, many of them were the unconscious creatures of it. They were strongly represented in aristocracy, but a great number were the middle classes, though almost wholly the middle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, which was still by far the largest part of the population, they were simply derided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that while they led the nation in many of its higher departments, they could produce nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather previously called folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts, rhymes or proverbs, is all royalist. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature. All these things, however, are simply things that other people might have noticed about them. They are not the most important things and certainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps. The first being the moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, and the second, the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with the first, especially as it was this which determined all the external social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest Puritans, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage, possessed himself of the first principle, which is one of the three or four alternative first principles which are possible to the mind of man. It was the principle that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the mind of God. It may surely be called the anti-sacramental principle, but it really applies, and he really applied it to many things beside the sacraments of the church. It equally applies, and he equally applied it to heart, to letters, to the love of locality, to music, and even to good manners. The phrase about no priest coming between a man and his creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophical doctrine. The true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or storyteller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of genius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion, denounced all music as mere drug, and forbade his own admirers who read his own admirable novels. The English Puritans were not only Puritans, but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness of head. As we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an English thing. But this was the driving power and the direction, and the doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle is insane. Intellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe, and the next step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct as well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God, which meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and milder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say that nothing a man did could help him accept his confession of Christ. With Calvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could not help him, since omnipotence must have disposed of all his destiny beforehand, that man must be created to be lost and saved. In the purer types of whom I speak, this logic was white hot, and we must read the formula into all their parliamentary and legal formula. When we read, the Puritan Party demanded reforms in the church, we must understand the Puritan Party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men are created to be lost and saved. When we read, the army selected persons for their godliness, we must understand the army selected those person who seemed most convinced that men are created to be lost and saved. It should be added that this terrible trend was not confined even to Protestant countries. Some great Romanists doubtfully followed it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age and should be a permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Escalar Milton, without crying out like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, How Splendid, How Glorious, and Oh What an Escape. The next thing to note is that their conception of the Church government was in a true sense self-government and yet, for a particular reason, turned out to be rather selfish government. It was equal and yet it was exclusive. Internally the Synod or Conventical tended to be a small republic, but fortunately to be a very small republic. In relation to the street outside, the Conventical was not a republic but an aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies. That of the elect, for it was not a right of birth, but a right before birth, and alone of all nobilities, it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we have on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans, a ring of real republican virtue, a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues, publicity. One of the regicides on trial for his life struck the note which all the unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility. This thing was not done in a corner, but their most drastic idealism did nothing to recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people. They were indeed very like that dreadful scaffold at which the regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public. They may have been public spirited. They were never popular. And it seems never to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular. England was never so little of democracy as during the short time when she was a republic. The struggle with the stewards, which is the next passage in our history, arose from an alliance which some may think an accidental alliance between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism, which affected the cultural world, as did our recent intellectual fashion of collectivism. The second was the older thing, which had made that creed and perhaps that cultured world possible, the aristocratic revolt under the last tutors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and a son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really from hatred of idolatry and the older solely from love of gold. It is at once the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal passion that passed and the transient or terrestrial passion that remained. This was true of England. It was far less true of Scotland. And that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at Worcestershire. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist manner in both countries, a mere brigandage of barons, and even John Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely anti-national politician. The Patriot Party in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did become popular in the low lands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our own land. And since Scotland, puritanism was the main thing and was mixed with parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England, parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing and was mixed with puritanism. When the storm began to rise against Charles I, after the more or less transitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the instances commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny Gettys, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English legend is that of John Hamden, the great squire who raised the country against 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 and natural leaders of the English. But they were leaders who allowed no mutiny among their followers. There was certainly no village Hamden in Hamden Village. The stewards, it may be suspected, brought from Scotland a more medieval and therefore more logical view of their own function. For the note of their nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I was a Scotch and pedant. It is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I also was not a little of a pedant, being very much of a Scotch. He had also the virtues of a Scotch, courage and quiet, natural dignity and an appetite for the things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very unenglish and could not manage a compromise. He tried instead to split hairs and seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy. But he was of the sort that sees everything in black and white and it is therefore remembered, especially the black. From the first he fenced with his parliamentess with a mere foe. Perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman who wished to finish the chapter in order to find out what happened to Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt to make him strong in the fashion of a French king and perished on the scaffold of frustrated rich Lou. The parliament, claiming the power of the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first carried all before him. The success passed to the wealth of the parliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience ingenious of Cromwell, and Charles died the same death as his great servant. Historically, the quarrel resolved itself through ramifications generally followed, perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the great modern query of whether a king can raise taxes without the consent of his parliament. The test case was that of Hamden, the great Buckingham Shire magnet who challenged the legality of attacks which Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators, always of necessity, seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires made a legend of the medieval Magna Carta, and they were so far in a true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths cover two parts of the problem of the steward fall, which are very different certainly and should be considered separately. For the first point about democracy, no candid person in the face of the facts can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that the 17th century parliament was fighting for the truth. It is not possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn of the Middle Ages parliament was always actively aristocratic and actively anti-popular, the institution which forbade Charles of first to raise ship money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals from Charles of first was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from the village community. It was the same institution which only two generations before had eagerly helped to destroy not merely things of popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly had, another more patriotic and creative side, but it was exclusively the work of the great lords that was done by parliament. The House of Commons has itself been a house of lords. But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign against the stewards, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are set against the stewards, the real contemporary case for their enemies is little realized, for it is connected with what our insular history most neglects, the condition of the continent. It should be remembered that though the stewards failed in England, they fought for things that succeeded in Europe. These were roughly first the effects of the counter reformation, which made the sincere Protestant sea steward Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the spread of a conflagration. Charles II, for instance, was a man of strong, skeptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was quite certainly and even reluctantly convinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost awful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It was more logical and in many ways more equal and even equitable than the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law. There was letter de cachet as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the law were better off than the French. A French satirist would probably have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse off than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was with the squire, but he was, if anything, more limited when he was a magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually weaker as agent of the king. In defending this state of things, in short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were, in a real sense, defending liberty. They were even defending some remains of medieval liberty, though not the best. The jury, not the guild, even feudalism, had involved a localism not without liberal elements which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who love such things might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the state, which for Hobbes was a single monster and for France a single man. As to the mere facts, it must be said, again, that in so far as puritanism was pure, it was unfortunately passing, and the very type of the transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who is popularly credited with making it predominant. Oliver Cromwell is, in history, much less the leader of puritanism than the tamer of puritanism. He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his life, by the rather somber religious passions of his period. But as he emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the positivism of the English as compared with the puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of the Puritan squires, but he is steadily more of the squire and less of the puritan, and he points to the process by which the squierarchy became, at last, merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised and most of what is blamed in him, the key to the comparative sanity, toleration, and modern efficiency of many of his departures, the key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist, and he cannot be without absurdity be held up as an ideal. But he was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English, not without public spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very unreason. The act of killing the king, I fancy, was not primarily his and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the high, inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had to compromise, but with whom he afterward collided. It was logic rather than cruelty in the act that was not promwellian, for he treated with beastial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness regarded as beasts, or as the modern euphemism would put it as aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization than to a sort of human sacrifice in the very center and forum of it. He is not a representative regicide. In a sense, that piece of headsmanship was rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or vision, and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into the valley to be the victim of the promwellian common sense. Promwell said that God had delivered them into his hand, but it was their own God who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as overpowering as the nightmare and as passing. It was the Whig rather than the Puritan, the triumph on that day. It was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise, and even what followed Cronwell's death, the restoration, was an aristocratic compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for medieval king, but the protectorate and the restoration were more of a piece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things where there seemed to be a rescue, it was ultimately a respite. Thus the Puritan regime had risen chiefly by one thing, unknown to medievalism, militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans became masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories and Whigs, but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years War. A discovery is an incurable disease, and it had been discovered that a crowd to be turned into an iron centipede crushing larger and looser crowds. Similarly, the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans, but they had eventually to be rescued again by dickens from the utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by someone from the vegetarians and teetotalers. The strange army passed and vanished almost like a Muslim invasion, but it had made the difference that armed valor and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It was the final break in our history. It was a breaker of many things, and perhaps a popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal symbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed they tried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in the very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage things they invoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what is called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest Jew, and they, and indeed their age generally, turned witch-hunting from an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed disappeared together, but they remain as something nobler than the nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continue their work. They were above all things anti-historic, like the futurists in Italy, and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament, and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was properly considered but a very secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western shires, cut down the thorn of Blastonbury, from which had grown the whole story of Britain. CHAPTER XIV THE TRIUMPH OF THE WIGS Whether or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can be little doubt that the restoration did not really restore. Charles II was never in the old sense a king. He was a leader of the opposition to his own ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept his official post, and because his brother and successor was an incredibly stupid politician he lost it. The throne was already only one of the official posts. In some ways indeed Charles II was fitted for the more modern world than beginning. He was rather an 18th century than a 17th century man. He was as witty as a character in a comedy and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not of Shakespeare. He was more modern yet, when he enjoyed the pure experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and his brother, however, had two links with what was in England, the losing side, and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was of course the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it neared the next century, was their tie with the French monarchy. We will deal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much more irreligious age, but the truth about it is tangled and far from easy to trace. The tutors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally and even fiercely that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism, or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism, there can be no doubt that a person like Herrick, for instance, as late as the Civil War, was stuffed with superstitions which were Catholic in the extreme sense we should now call continental. Yet many similar Parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of continental Catholicism, not even as the errant Church of Christ, but as the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is therefore very hard now to guess the proportion of Protestantism, but there's no doubt about its presence, especially its presence in centers of importance like London. By the time of Charles II, after the purge of the Puritan terror, it had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds, or the craft of Tudor nobles. The Monmouth Rebellion showed that it had a popular, though and its sufficiently popular, backing. The no-popery force became the crowd if it never became the people. It was perhaps increasingly an urban crowd and was subject to those epidemics of detailed illusion with which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of today. One of these scares and scoops, not to add less technical name of lies, was the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the tail of the warming pan, or the bogus air to the throne, a storm that finally swept away James II. The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those eological but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate about the Church of England then and now differs from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do or whether that institution ought to alter but about what that institution actually is. One party then as now only cared for it because it was Catholic and the other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now something had certainly happened to the English, quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was. It had a whole different indeed from that of the medieval church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility which clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely different purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the 17th century. He is probably right, but he does not guess that this was but the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman, but a peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then as in Europe now, many entertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a fashion that was emotionally vivid, though intellectually vague. When therefore James II seemed to menace his practicing communion, he aroused something at least more popular than the mere prigishness of the Wiglords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I mean the fact that the influence, then cold popish, was then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuits seemed to the English not merely a conspirator, but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about abstract speculations to many Englishmen, and the abstract speculations of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things undreamed of here. The last steward proposals for toleration seemed thus to many as vast and empty as atheism. The only 17th century Englishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were the Quakers. And the cozy English compromise shuttered when the two things shook hands, for it was something much more than a steward intrigue, which made these philosophical extremes meet merely because they were philosophical, and which brought the weary but humorous mind of Charles II into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn. Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the steward scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and, therefore, fanciful. It was in advance of its age, or to use a more intelligent language, too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the actual and the English moderates must be added in what proportion we know not a persecuting hatred of popery, almost maniacal but quite sincere. The state had long, as we have seen, been turned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends of priests. Men talk of the revocation of the edict of Nantes, but the English persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at least by this time the English, like the French persecutors, were repressing a minority. Unfortunately, there was another province of government in which they were still more madly persecuting the majority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on its terrific character, that lingering crime that was called Government of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network of unnatural laws by which that country was covered till toward the end of the 18th century. It is enough to say here that the whole attitude to the Irish was tragically typified and tied up with our expulsion of the stewards in one of those acts that are remembered forever. James II fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventually found refuge in Ireland which took arms in his favor. The Prince of Orange, whom their aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in that country with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, but saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the military genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace could only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English government occupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter on which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it, but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it incessantly forever. But here again the steward position was much more vulnerable on the side of secular policy and especially a foreign policy. The aristocrats to whom power passed finally at the revolution were already ceasing to have any supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism, but they had a very natural faith in England as against France, and even in a certain sense in English institutions as against French institutions. And just as these men, the most un-Midi-Evil of mankind, could get boast about some Midi-Evil liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the jury, so they could appeal to a true Midi-Evil legend in the matter of a war with France. A typical 18th century oligarch like Horace Walpole could complain that the Ciceroan in an old church troubled him with traces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody when he was looking for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the naivete of skepticism and never dream how far away from John Gaunt he was really wandering in saying so. But though their notion of Midi-Evil history was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting the French could still in an ornamental way put on the armor of the Black Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter in short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular, as patriots will always be popular. It is true that the last stewards were themselves far from unpatriotic, and James II in particular may well be called the Fouter of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France, among other foreign countries. They took refuge in France, the elder before and the younger after his period of rule, and translated the later 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 England passed at the end of the 17th century is symbolized by two very separate and definite steps. The first, the accession of a Dutch king, and the second, the accession of a German king. In the first were present all the features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In the second we have the condition in which even those affecting it can hardly call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like a gun dragged into the breach of a wall, a foreign gun indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel in which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play a great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a hole in a wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as he was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was in private conviction a Calvinist, and nobody knew or cared what George was, except that he was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly Republican magistrate of what had once been a purely Republican experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth century, George was when he was at home pretty much what the king of the cannibal islands was when he was at home, a savage personal ruler scarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of acute if narrow intelligence. George was a man of no intelligence. Above all, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to a steward and ascended the throne hand in hand with a steward. He was a familiar figure and already a part of our royal family. With George there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there before, something hardly mentioned in medieval or Renaissance writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot, a barbarian from beyond the Rhine. The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these two foreign kings is therefore the true time of transition. It is the bridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enough to call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strong enough to deliberately call in a weak man who would allow them to help themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too much, but the whole may well be symbolized as the struggle of two great figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear about their own aims, and in everything else, a violent contrast at every point. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bollingbroke. The other was John Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of Churchill is primarily the story of the revolution and how he succeeded. The story of Bollingbroke is the story of the counter-revolution and how he had failed. Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, and he combines the presence of glory with the absence of honor. When the new aristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next few generations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but of chivalry. The revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by gentlemen. The popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are, factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of snobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the public schools were once undoubtedly public. By the revolution they were already becoming as private as they are now. But at least in the eighteenth century there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too generous sense, now given to the title. Types not merely honest but rash and romantic in their honesty remain in the record with the names of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen that the latter reformers defaced from fanaticism the churches which the first reformers had defaced simply from Everest. Rather in the same way the eighteenth century wigs often praised in a spirit of pure magnanimity what the seventeenth century wigs had done in a spirit of pure meanness. How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing that a great military hero had not even the ordinary military virtues of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his superior officers, that he picked his way through campaigns that had made him immortal with the watchful spirit of a thieving camp follower. When William landed at Torbay on the invitation of the other wig nobles, Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the army over to the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could aspire, but in their degree all the politicians of the revolution were upon this ethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James there was scarcely one of them who was not in correspondence with William. When they afterward surrounded the throne of William there was not one of them who was not still in correspondence with James. It was such men who defeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick. It was such men who defeated Scots Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe. Thus the strange yet splendid story of 18th century England is one of greatness founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point, or to vary the metaphor the new mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure. The fluctuation had been all in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the Genesis, if not the later generation of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only to mercantile, something which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity, something called Punica Fides, the great royalist strafford going disillusioned to death had said, put not your trust in princes. The great royalist Ballingbroke may well be said to have retorted, and least of all, in merchant princes. Ballingbroke stands for a whole body of convictions which bulked very big in English history, but which, with the recent windings of the course of history, have gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it, we cannot understand our past, nor I will add our future. Curiously enough, the best English books of the 18th century are crammed with it, yet modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of it. It is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as well as when he said that the devil was the first wig. Goldsmith is full of it. It is the whole point of that fine poem, The Deserted Village, and it is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in the vicar of Wakefield. Swift is full of it, and found in it an intellectual brotherhood and arms with Ballingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne, it was probably the opinion of the majority of people in England, but it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to rule. This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Ballingbroke, had many aspects. Perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the virtues of a despot is distance. It is the little tyrant of the fields that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant, he chiefly tortures the torturers, and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Ballingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical 18th-century intellect, a free-thinking deist, a clear and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for the stewards. It was defeated by the great Wigg Nobles, who formed the committee of the new regime of the Gentry. And considering who it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated by a trick. The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into it like a dummy, and a great English royalist went into exile. Twenty years afterward he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faith in a popular monarchy, but it is typical of the whole detachment and distinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to strengthen the heir of the king, whom he had tried to exclude. He was always a royalist, but never a Jacobite. But he cared for was not a royal family but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book The Patriot King, written in exile, and when he thought that George's great grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished he might be more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt with such unpromising instruments as George III and Lord Butte. And when these broke in his hand, he died with all the dignity of the said Victor Ketany, the great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature. But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is no better summary than this section from the first to the last of the foil coup d'etat of Balingbroke. In the first his policy made peace with France and broke the connection with Austria. In the second his policy again made peace with France and broke the connection with Prussia. For in that interval the seed of the moneylending squires of Brandenburg had waxed mighty and had already become that prodigy which has become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epic, Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representative sense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of his own and his country's glory. He summarized the New England of the revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that movement seemed too many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways what we should call a Jingo, and the Whig party was consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that all our public men were then aristocrats, but he was very emphatically what may be called a commercialist. One might almost say Carthaginian. In this connection it has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan. I mean that he could use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec. It was a young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to the English the Golden Gates of India. It was precisely one of the strong points of this 18th-century aristocracy that it wielded without friction the wealthier bourgeoisie. It was not there that social cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though Parliament was as narrow as the Senate, it was one of the great Senators. The very word recalls the role of those noble Roman phrases they often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong in calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fine air floor and scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland state of the stingy drill sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages into mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some ways like a shadow of chatham flung across the world, the sort of shadow that is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out long and thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in chatham was atheism in Frederick the Great, and what was in the first patriotism was in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal theory of a commonwealth that he can of its nature eat other commonwealths had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together and seemed for a time to be wedded. But not before the great balling-brook had made a dying gesture as if to forbid the bans.