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A Short History of England

G.K. Chesterton

Chatto & Windus

MCMXVII

Printed in England by

William Clowes and Sons, Limited,

London and Beccles.

All rights reserved

This edition published in August 2008

by



Contents

Introduction 3

The Province Of Britain 4

The Age Of Legends 6The Defeat Of The Barbarians 9

St. Edward And The Norman Kings 12

The Age Of The Crusades 15

The Problem of the Plantagenets 18

The Meaning of Merry England 21

Nationality and the French Wars 25

The War of the Usurpers 28

The Rebellion of the Rich 31

Spain and the Schism of Nations 35The Age of the Puritans 37

The Triumph of the Whigs 41

The War with the Great Republics 44

Aristocracy and the Discontents 47

The Return of the Barbarian 50

Conclusion 54



3

I ntroductIon

A Short History of England

Introduction

It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent,though upon a sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay

in English history, who make no pretence to particular schol-arship and am merely a member of the public. The answer isthat I know just enough to know one thing: that a history fromthe standpoint of a member of the public has not been writ-ten. What we call the popular histories should rather be calledthe anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without excep-tion, wrien against the people; and in them the populace iseither ignored or elaborately proved to have been wrong. It istrue that Green called his book “A Short History of the Eng-lish People”; but he seems to have thought it too short for thepeople to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls onevery large part of his story “Puritan England.” But Englandnever was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to callthe rise of Henry of Navarre “Puritan France.” And some ofour extreme Whig historians would have been prey nearlycapable of calling the campaign of Wexford and Drogheda“Puritan Ireland.”

But it is especially in the maer of the Middle Ages that thepopular histories trample upon the popular traditions. In thisrespect there is an almost comic contrast between the generalinformation provided about England in the last two or threecenturies, in which its present industrial system was being

built up, and the general information given about the preced-ing centuries, which we call broadly mediæval. Of the sort ofwaxwork history which is thought sucient for the side-show

of the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will besucient. A popular Encyclopædia appeared some years ago,professing among other things to teach English History tothe masses; and in this I came upon a series of pictures of theEnglish kings. No one could expect them to be all authentic;

but the interest aached to those that were necessarily imagi-nary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literaturefor portraits of men like Henry II. or Edward I.; but this didnot seem to have been found, or even sought. And wander-ing to the image that stood for Stephen of Blois, my eye wasstaggered by a gentleman with one of those helmets with steel

brims curved like a crescent, which went with the age of rusand trunk-hose. I am tempted to suspect that the head wasthat of a halberdier at some such scene as the execution ofMary Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets weremediæval; and any old helmet was good enough for Stephen.

Now suppose the readers of that work of reference hadlooked for the portrait of Charles I. and found the head of apoliceman. Suppose it had been taken, modern helmet andall, out of some snapshot in the Daily Sketch of the arrest ofMrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to say that thereaders would have refused to accept it as a lifelike portraitof Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that theremust be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed betweenStephen and Mary was much longer than the time that has

elapsed between Charles and ourselves. The revolution in

human society between the rst of the Crusades and the of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and compthan any change between Charles and ourselves. And, aball, that revolution should be the rst thing and the nal in anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the stof how our populace gained great things, but to-day has everything.

Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about Elish history than this; and that I have as much right to mapopular summary of it as the gentleman who made the c

sader and the halberdier change hats. But the curious andresting thing about the neglect, one might say the omissimediæval civilization in such histories as this, lies in the I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that iout of the popular history. For instance, even a working ma carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught abouGreat Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save thatalmost monstrous solitude came from being before its timinstead of aer. He was not taught that the whole stu ofMiddle Ages was sti with the parchment of charters; thaciety was once a system of charters, and of a kind much minteresting to him. The carpenter heard of one charter giv

barons, and chiey in the interest of barons; the carpentenot hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, to cooto all the people like himself. Or, to take another instancethe boy and girl reading the stock simplied histories of schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burghuntil he appears in a shirt with a noose round his neck. Tcertainly do not imagine anything of what he meant in thMiddle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceivthemselves as taking part in any such romance as the advture of Courtrai, where the mediæval shopkeepers more won their spurs — for they won the spurs of their enemie

I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the liI know of this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a m

brought up in the lower quarters of a great house, fed maon its leavings and burdened mostly with its labours. I kthat his complaints are stilled, and his status justied, bystory that is told to him. It is about how his grandfather wa chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods, ca

by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. Inlight of this, he may well be thankful for the almost humlife that he enjoys; and may be content with the hope of ling behind him a yet more evolved animal. Strangely enothe calling of this story by the sacred name of Progress ceto satisfy me when I began to suspect (and to discover) thit is not true. I know by now enough at least of his originknow that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. H

family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that nomonkey could have climbed it; rather it is like that tree toup by the roots and named “Dedischado,” on the shield unknown knight.



4

Short History of England G.K. Chesterton

I

The Province Of Britain

he land on which we live once had the highly poetic privi-ge of being the end of the world. Its extremity was ultimaule , the other end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a

ght of northern seas, were lit up at last by the long search-ghts of Rome, it was felt that the remotest remnant of thingsd been touched; and more for pride than possession.

he sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. Aboutese realms upon the edge of everything there was reallymething that can only be called edgy. Britain is not souch an island as an archipelago; it is at least a labyrinth ofninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can one so easilyd so strangely nd sea in the elds or elds in the sea. Theeat rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely toiss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low aswhole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains;

d a prehistoric tradition has taught it to look towards thenset for islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders area kind with their islands. Dierent as are the nations into

hich they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish,e Welsh of the western uplands, have something altogethererent from the humdrum docility of the inland Germans,from the bon sens français which can be at will trenchanttrite. There is something common to all the Britons, whichen Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest namer it is insecurity, something ing in men walking on clisd the verge of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a

umour without wit, perplex their critics and perplex them-lves. Their souls are freed like their coasts. They have an

mbarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is expressed, per-ps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the Englisha confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license with

e symbol of language. But Bull’s own bull, the English bull,“a dumb ox of thought”; a standing mystication in theind. There is something double in the thoughts as of theul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they are leastached to the purely classical; the imperial plainness whiche French do nely and the Germans coarsely, but the Britonsrdly at all. They are constantly colonists and emigrants;ey have the name of being at home in every country. Butey are in exile in their own country. They are torn betweenve of home and love of something else; of which the sea may

the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also founda nameless nursery rhyme which is the nest line in Englisherature and the dumb refrain of all English poems — ”Overe hills and far away.”

he great rationalist hero who rst conquered Britain,hether or no he was the detached demigod of “Cæsar andeopatra,” was certainly a Latin of the Latins, and describedese islands when he found them with all the curt positiv-m of his pen of steel. But even Julius Cæsar ’s brief accountthe Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, whichmore than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled byat terrible thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless

yet arranged in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order andlabour of those that lied them. Their worship was prob-ably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may count forsomething in the elemental quality that has always soaked theisland arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empiresuggests the presence of something which generally growsout of Nature-worship — I mean the unnatural. But upon near-ly all the maers of modern controversy Cæsar is silent. Heis silent about whether the language was “Celtic”; and someof the place-names have even given rise to a suggestion that,

in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not capable ofpronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am ofpronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my own verysimple purpose. And indeed their importance has been verymuch exaggerated. Cæsar professed to give no more than theglimpse of a traveller; but when, some considerable time aer,the Romans returned and turned Britain into a Roman prov-ince, they continued to display a singular indierence to ques-tions that have excited so many professors. What they caredabout was geing and giving in Britain what they had gotand given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then,or for that maer the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric orTeutonic. We do know that in a short time they were Roman.

Every now and then there is discovered in modern Englandsome fragment such as a Roman pavement. Such Romanantiquities rather diminish than increase the Roman reality.They make something seem distant which is still very near,and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like writinga man’s epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would prob-ably be a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. Theimportant thing about France and England is not that theyhave Roman remains. They are Roman remains. In truth theyare not so much remains as relics; for they are still workingmiracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than a rowof pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but

grown like fungoids upon this original work of man; and ourwoods are mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seedof our harvests and the roots of our trees is a foundation ofwhich the fragments of tile and brick are but emblems; andunder the colours of our wildest owers are the colours of aRoman pavement.

Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years;longer than she has been Protestant, and very much longerthan she has been industrial. What was meant by being Ro-man it is necessary in a few lines to say, or no sense can bemade of what happened aer, especially of what happenedimmediately aer. Being Roman did not mean being subject,in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in

the sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watchedwith a horrible hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish.Both conquerors and conquered were heathen, and both hadthe institutions which seem to us to give an inhumanity toheathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the lack of allthe sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the RomanEmpire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them.Britons were not originally proud of being Britons; but theywere proud of being Romans. The Roman steel was at least asmuch a magnet as a sword. In truth it was rather a round mir-ror of steel, in which every people came to see itself. For Romeas Rome the very smallness of the civic origin was a warrantfor the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself obvious-



5

the ProvInce of BrItaIn

ly could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean itcould not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helotsor the Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to

be human; it had to have a handle that ed any man’s hand.The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it be-came more of an Empire; until not very long aer Rome gaveconquerors to Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome.Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the greatEmpress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. Andit was Constantine, as all men know, who rst nailed up thatproclamation which all aer generations have in truth beenstruggling either to protect or to tear down.

About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impar-tial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so.That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since itidentied the dead body on a servile gibbet with the father-hood in the skies, has long been a commonplace withoutceasing to be a paradox. But there is another historic elementthat must also be realized. Without saying anything more ofits tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why evenpre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical forlong aerwards by all European men. The extreme view of itwas held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediævalism,

and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded asMan, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost thatMan had done. It was divinely necessary that the RomanEmpire should succeed — if only that it might fail. Hence theschool of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldierskilled Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. Thatmere law might fail at its highest test it had to be real law, andnot mere military lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pi-late as by Peter. Therefore the mediæval poet is eager to showthat Roman government was simply good government, andnot a usurpation. For it was the whole point of the Christianrevolution to maintain that in this, good government was as

bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough

to know God among the thieves. This is not only generallyimportant as involving a colossal change in the conscience; theloss of the whole heathen repose in the complete suciency ofthe city or the state. It made a sort of eternal rule enclosing aneternal rebellion. It must be incessantly remembered throughthe rst half of English history; for it is the whole meaning inthe quarrel of the priests and kings.

The double rule of the civilization and the religion in onesense remained for centuries; and before its rst misfortunescame it must be conceived as substantially the same every-where. And however it began it largely ended in equality.Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the most democraticstates of ancient times. Harsh ocialism certainly existed, as it

exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But therewas nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy,still less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far asany change was passing over that society with its two levelsof equal citizens and equal slaves, it was only the slow growthof the power of the Church at the expense of the power of theEmpire. Now it is important to grasp that the great exceptionto equality, the institution of Slavery, was slowly modied by

both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of theEmpire and by the strengthening of the Church.

Slavery was for the Church not a diculty of doctrine, but astrain on the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who

had dened the servile or “useful” arts, had regarded theslave as a tool, an axe to cut wood or whatever wanted cuting. The Church did not denounce the cuing; but she feif she was cuing glass with a diamond. She was hauntedthe memory that the diamond is so much more precious the glass. So Christianity could not sele down into the psimplicity that the man was made for the work, when thework was so much less immortally momentous than the At about this stage of a history of England there is generatold the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the Great; and thisperhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the barian bondmen were meant to be useful. The saint’s mysticwas moved at nding them ornamental; and “Non AngliAngeli” meant more nearly “Not slaves, but souls.” It is tpoint, in passing, to note that in the modern country moslectively Christian, Russia, the serfs were always referred“souls.” The great Pope’s phrase, hackneyed as it is, is pethe rst glimpse of the golden halos in the best ChristianThus the Church, with whatever other faults, worked of own nature towards greater social equality; and it is a hiscal error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked waristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversof aristocracy; in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to brst. The Irish bull that “One man is as good as another agreat deal beer” contains a truth, like many contradictioa truth that was the link between Christianity and citizenAlone of all superiors, the saint does not depress the humdignity of others. He is not conscious of his superiority tothem; but only more conscious of his inferiority than the

But while a million lile priests and monks like mice wealready nibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, anprocess was going on, which has here been called the weening of the Empire. It is a process which is to this day vedicult to explain. But it aected all the institutions of althe provinces, especially the institution of Slavery. But ofthe provinces its eect was heaviest in Britain, which lay

or beyond the borders. The case of Britain, however, cannpossibly be considered alone. The rst half of English hishas been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the ato tell it without reference to that corporate Christendomwhich it took part and pride. I fully accept the truth in Mpling’s question of “What can they know of England whoEngland know?” and merely dier from the view that thwill best broaden their minds by the study of Wagga-Waand Timbuctoo. It is therefore necessary, though very dito frame in few words some idea of what happened to thwhole European race.

Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was tweakest thing in it. The centre had been growing fainter

fainter, and now the centre disappeared. Rome had as mfreed the world as ruled it, and now she could rule no mSave for the presence of the Pope and his constantly increing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became like onof her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the rerather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There wasanarchy, but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must hprinciple, and therefore (for those who can think) an authity. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose “The DeclinFall of the Roman Empire.” The Empire did decline, but not fall. It remains to this hour.

By a process very much more indirect even than that of t



6


hurch, this decentralization and dri also worked againste slave-state of antiquity. The localism did indeed produceat choice of territorial chieains which came to be calledudalism, and of which we shall speak later. But the di-ct possession of man by man the same localism tended tostroy; though this negative inuence upon it bears no kindproportion to the positive inuence of the Catholic Church.

he later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour whichcreasingly resembles it, was worked on a larger and largerale; and it was at last too large to control. The bondmanund the visible Lord more distant than the new invisiblee. The slave became the serf; that is, he could be shut in,

ut not shut out. When once he belonged to the land, it couldt be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the oldd rather ctitious language of chael slavery, there is here

dierence. It is the dierence between a man being a chaird a man being a house. Canute might call for his throne; buthe wanted his throne-room he must go and get it himself.milarly, he could tell his slave to run, but he could only tells serf to stay. Thus the two slow changes of the time bothnded to transform the tool into a man. His status began tove roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.

What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization;

e loss of leers, of laws, of roads and means of communica-on, the exaggeration of local colour into caprice. But on theges of the Empire this decivilization became a denite bar-rism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who weready to destroy as deay and blindly as things are destroyedre. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic locust-ight of the

uns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even in thoserkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when wee speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge ofrbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happenedsome of the borders of the Empire; of such edges of theown world as we began by describing in these pages. Andthe extreme edge of the world lay Britain.

may be true, though there is lile proof of it, that the Ro-an civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the otherovinces; but it was a very civilized civilization. It gatheredund the great cities like York and Chester and London;r the cities are older than the counties, and indeed olderen than the countries. These were connected by a skeletongreat roads which were and are the bones of Britain. Butth the weakening of Rome the bones began to break underrbarian pressure, coming at rst from the north; from thects who lay beyond Agricola’s boundary in what is now theotch Lowlands. The whole of this bewildering time is full ofmporary tribal alliances, generally mercenary; of barbariansid to come on or barbarians paid to go away. It seems cer-

n that in this welter Roman Britain bought help from ruderces living about that neck of Denmark where is now the

uchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to ght some-dy they naturally fought anybody; and a century of ghtingllowed, under the trampling of which the Roman pavementas broken into yet smaller pieces. It is perhaps permissibledisagree with the historian Green when he says that noot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen than theighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people arepposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their ap-arance is the real beginning of our island story. It would bether more true to say that it was nearly, though prematurely,e end of it.

III

The Age Of Legends

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaicmodern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned with-out warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of

the spinsters in Cranford , aer tidily sweeping the room witha broom, were to y away on a broomstick. Our aentionwould be arrested if one of Jane Austen’s young ladies whohad just met a dragoon were to walk a lile further and meeta dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transitiontakes place in British history at the end of the purely Romanperiod. We have to do with rational and almost mechanicalaccounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureau-cracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in theireciency and ineciency; and then all of a sudden we arereading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars againstmen as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier ofcivilization is no longer ghting with Goths but with gob-

lins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknownto history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain howa Roman ruler or a Welsh chieain towers up in the twilightas the awful and unbegoen Arthur. The scientic age comesrst and the mythological age aer it. One working example,the echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature,may serve to sum up the contrast. The British state which wasfound by Cæsar was long believed to have been founded byBrutus. The contrast between the one very dry discovery andthe other very fantastic foundation has something decidedlycomic about it; as if Cæsar’s “Et tu, Brute,” might be trans-lated, “What, you here?” But in one respect the fable is quite

as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality ofthe Roman foundation of our insular society, and show thateven the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman.When England is Eland, the elves are not the Angles. All thephrases that can be used as clues through that tangle of tradi-tions are more or less Latin phrases. And in all our speechthere was no word more Roman than “romance.”

The Roman legions le Britain in the fourth century. This didnot mean that the Roman civilization le it; but it did meanthat the civilization lay far more open both to admixtureand aack. Christianity had almost certainly come to Brit-ain, not indeed otherwise than by the routes established byRome, but certainly long before the ocial Roman mission

of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It maythen rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire andits new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and thatthe description of the general civilization in the last chapteris proportionately irrelevant. This, however, is not the chieftruth of the maer.

There is one fundamental fact which must be understood ofthe whole of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearlyturn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost everymodern man has in his head an association between freedomand the future. The whole culture of our time has been full of

the notion of “A Good Time Coming.” Now the whole cul-



7

the age of Legends

ture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of “A Good TimeGoing.” They looked backwards to old enlightenment and for-wards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel

between faith and hope — which perhaps must be healed bycharity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped — butit may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motivesthat make a man a progressive now made a man a conserva-tive then. The more he could keep of the past the more hehad of a fair law and a free state; the more he gave way to thefuture the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege.

All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And thisis the clue which we must carry with us through the lives ofall the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dun-stan. If the most extreme modern Republican were put backin that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or evenImperialist. For the Pope was what was le of the Empire; andthe Empire what was le of the Republic.

We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one whohas le free cities and even free elds behind him, and isforced to advance towards a forest. And the forest is the estmetaphor, not only because it was really that wild Europeangrowth cloven here and there by the Roman roads, but also

because there has always been associated with forests anotheridea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The ideaof the forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notionof things being double or dierent from themselves, of beasts

behaving like men and not merely, as modern wits would say,of men behaving like beasts. But it is precisely here that it ismost necessary to remember that an age of reason had pre-ceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has sustainedthe 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 maer is this: that in this barbar-ic time none of the heroes are barbaric. They are only heroes if

they are anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became omnipresent like gods among the people, andforced themselves into the faintest memory and the shortestrecord, exactly in proportion as they had mastered the hea-then madness of the time and preserved the Christian ratio-nality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name becausehe killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have nonames at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English his-tory, but less than nothing of Irish history, have heard some-how or other of Brian Boru, though they spell it Boroo andseem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It is a joke thesubtlety of which they would never have been able to enjoy,if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the

great Bale of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader wouldnever have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not “preachedthe Gospel with his sword”; or of the Cid if he had not foughtagainst the Crescent. And though Alfred the Great seems tohave deserved his title even as a personality, he was not sogreat as the work he had to do.

But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred.For the age is the age of legends. Towards these legends mostmen adopt by instinct a sane aitude; and, of the two, cre-dulity is certainly much more sane than incredulity. It doesnot much maer whether most of the stories are true; and (asin such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to realize that the

question does not maer is the rst step towards answering

it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything likeaempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its leghe will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of thtending to correct the crude and very thoughtless scepti-cism which has made this part of the story so sterile. Thenineteenth-century historians went on the curious princiof dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and conctrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthis made uerly impersonal because all legends are lies, bsomebody of the type of Hengist is made quite an impor

personality, merely because nobody thought him importenough to lie about. Now this is to reverse all common seA great many wiy sayings are aributed to Talleyrand wwere really said by somebody else. But they would not bso aributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he h

been a fable. That ctitious stories are told about a personine times out of ten, extremely good evidence that theresomebody to tell them about. Indeed some allow that malous things were done, and that there may have been a mnamed Arthur at the time in which they were done; but hso far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes rather ddo not understand the aitude which holds that there waArk and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the ex

tence of Noah’s Ark.The other fact to be remembered is that scientic researcfor the last few years has worked steadily in the directionconrming and not dissipating the legends of the populaTo take only the obvious instance, modern excavators wimodern spades have found a solid stone labyrinth in Crelike that associated with the Minataur, which was conceias being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most peoplthis would have seemed quite as frantic as nding the roof Jack’s Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard’s cupboayet it is simply the fact. Finally, a truth is to be rememberwhich scarcely ever is remembered in estimating the pas

It is the paradox that the past is always present: yet it is nwhat was, but whatever seems to have been; for all the pa part of faith. What did they believe of their fathers? In tmaer new discoveries are useless because they are new. may nd men wrong in what they thought they were, bucannot nd them wrong in what they thought they thougIt is therefore very practical to put in a few words, if posssomething of what a man of these islands in the Dark Agwould have said about his ancestors and his inheritance.aempt here to put some of the simpler things in their orof importance as he would have seen them; and if we areunderstand our fathers who rst made this country anytlike itself, it is most important that we should remember

if this was not their real past, it was their real memory.Aer that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, wwas for these men hardly second to the creation of the wSt. Joseph of Arimathea, one of the few followers of the nreligion who seem to have been wealthy, set sail as a misary, and aer long voyages came to that lier of lile islawhich seemed to the men of the Mediterranean somethinlike the last clouds of the sunset. He came up upon the wern and wilder side of that wild and western land, and mhis way to a valley which through all the oldest records icalled Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its land meadows, or something in some lost pagan traditio

about it, made it persistently regarded as a kind of Earth



8


radise. Arthur, aer being slain at Lyonesse, is carried here,if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his sta in the soil;d it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas Day.

mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth;e very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophiesd oriental negations that were its rst foes it fought ercelyd particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure concretealadies by concrete substances. Hence the scaering of rel-s was everywhere like the scaering of seed. All who tookeir mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible fragments

hich became the germs of churches and cities. St. Josephrried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper ande blood of the Crucixion to that shrine in Avalon whiche now call Glastonbury; and it became the heart of a wholeniverse of legends and romances, not only for Britain but forurope. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition

s called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially theward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthurasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeshipch as was aerwards imitated or invented by mediævalighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance

mblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experi-ent. The idea of a round table is not merely universality butuality. It has in it, modied of course, by other tendenciesdierentiation, the same idea that exists in the very wordeers,” as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the

ound Table is as Roman as the round arch, which mightso serve as a type; for instead of being one barbaric rockerely rolled on the others, the king was rather the keystonean arch. But to this tradition of a level of dignity was addedmething unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; theivilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heavenhich seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the yingalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes,d which appeared to one knight who was hardly more than

child.ightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for aernturies as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had beenmirror of universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is oflossal import in all ensuing aairs, especially the aairs ofrbarians. These and numberless other local legends are in-ed for us buried by the forests of popular fancies that haveown out of them. It is all the harder for the serious modernind because our fathers felt at home with these tales, anderefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme whichns,

“When good King Arthur ruled this land

He was a noble king He stole three pecks of barley meal,”

much nearer the true mediæval note than the aristocraticateliness of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of thepular fancy there is one last thing to be remembered. It

ust especially be remembered by those who would dwellclusively on documents, and take no note of tradition at. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning alle old wives’ tales, it would not be so wild as the errors thatn arise from trusting to wrien evidence when there is notough of it. Now the whole wrien evidence for the rstrts of our history would go into a small book. A very few

tails are mentioned, and none are explained. A fact thus

standing alone, without the key of contemporary thought,may be very much more misleading than any fable. To knowwhat word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of whatthing he meant, may produce a result that is literally mad.Thus, for instance, it would be unwise to accept literally thetale that St. Helena was not only a native of Colchester, butwas a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would not be veryunwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced fromdocuments. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour toSt. Helena, and might have had a king named Cole. According

to the more serious story, the saint’s father was an innkeeper;and the only recorded action of Cole is well within the re-sources of that calling. It would not be nearly so unwise asto deduce from the wrien word, as some critic of the futuremay do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.



9

the defeat of the BarBarIans

IV

The Defeat Of The Barbarians

It is a quaint accident that we employ the word “short-sighted” as a condemnation; but not the word “long-sighted,”which we should probably use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet

the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightlysay, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is veryshort-sighted to be indierent to all that is historic. But it isas disastrously long-sighted to be interested only in what isprehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportionof the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded ep-ochs for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, theenslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossalmigrations and massacres upon which their theories repose,are no part of history or even of legend. And rather than trustwith entire simplicity to these it would be innitely wiser totrust to legend of the loosest and most local sort. In any case,it is as well to record even so simple a conclusion as that what

is prehistoric is unhistorical.

But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the criticism of some prodigious racial theories.To employ the same gure, suppose the scientic historiansexplain the historic centuries in terms of a prehistoric divi-sion between short-sighted and long-sighted men. They couldcite their instances and illustrations. They would certainlyexplain the curiosity of language I mentioned rst, as show-ing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and theirname therefore a term of contempt. They could give us verygraphic pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show howthe long-sighted people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-

hand struggles with axe and knife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantage veered to the long-sighted,and their enemies were shot down in droves. I could easilywrite a ruthless romance about it, and still more easily a ruth-less anthropological theory. According to that thesis whichrefers all moral to material changes, they could explain thetradition that old people grow conservative in politics by thewell-known fact that old people grow more long-sighted.But I think there might be one thing about this theory whichwould stump us, and might even, if it be possible, stumpthem. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the threethousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature ofevery conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention

of the oculist question for which all had been dared and done.Suppose not one of the living or dead languages of mankindhad so much as a word for “long-sighted” or “short-sighted.”Suppose, in short, the question that had torn the whole worldin two was never even asked at all, until some spectacle-mak-er suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think weshould nd it hard to believe that this physical dierence hadreally played so fundamental a part in human history. Andthat is exactly the case with the physical dierence betweenthe Celts, the Teutons and the Latins.

I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevent-ed from falling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not

believe that whether a man was long-headed or round-headed

ever made much dierence to any one who felt inclined t break his head. To all mortal appearance, in all mortal reand experience, people seem to have killed or spared, maor refrained from marriage, made kings or made slaves, reference to almost any other consideration except this onThere was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a famithere were enthusiasms for a prince and his hereditary othere were passions rooted in locality, special emotions asea-folk or mountain-folk; there were historic memories cause or an alliance; there was, more than all, the tremen

test of religion. But of a cause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half the earth, there was lile or nothing. Rwas not only never at any given moment a motive, but itnever even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed; thenever had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that th

began even to have a cant.

The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarksthe singularity of Britain in being alone of all Roman proes wholly cleared and repeopled by a Germanic race. Henot entertain, as an escape from the singularity of this evthe possibility that it never happened. In the same spirit deals with the lile that can be quoted of the Teutonic soHis ideal picture of it is completed in small touches whiceven an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will toucon the Teuton with a phrase like “the basis of their societwas the free man”; and on the Roman with a phrase like mines, if worked by forced labour, must have been a souof endless oppression.” The simple fact being that the Roand the Teuton both had slaves, he treats the Teuton freeas the only thing to be considered, not only then but nowand then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treahis slaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresa “strange disappointment” that Gildas, the only Britishchronicler, does not describe the great Teutonic system. Iopinion of Gildas, a modication of that of Gregory, it wa

case of non Angli sed diaboli. The modern Teutonist is “dispointed” that the contemporary authority saw nothing inTeutons except wolves, dogs, and whelps from the kenne

barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that there was ing else to be seen.

In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbrized land, with what may be called the second of the thrgreat southern visitations which civilized these islands, hdid not see any ethnological problems, whatever there mhave been to be seen. With him or his converts the chain literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look atworld as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beywhose borders lay other kingdoms of about the same siz

the kings of which were all apparently heathen. The namof these kings were mostly what we call Teutonic names;those who write the almost entirely hagiological records not say, and apparently did not ask, whether the populatwere in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least possiblethat, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almothe only Teutonic element. The Christians found convertthey found patrons, they found persecutors; but they didnd Ancient Britons because they did not look for them; if they moved among pure Anglo-Saxons they had not thgratication of knowing it. There was, indeed, what all htory aests, a marked change of feeling towards the mar

of Wales. But all history also aests that this is always fou



10


art from any dierence in race, in the transition from thewlands to the mountain country. But of all the things theyund the thing that counts most in English history is this:at some of the kingdoms at least did correspond to genuine

uman divisions, which not only existed then but which existw. Northumbria is still a truer thing than Northumberland.ssex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon

ngdom whose name is not even to be found upon the map,e kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-y the most real of them all.

he last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross wasercia, which corresponds very roughly to what we call theidlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achievedcertain picturesqueness through this fact, and through therays and furious ambitions which constituted the rest of hisputation; so much so that the other day one of those mysticsho will believe anything but Christianity proposed to “con-nue the work of Penda” in Ealing: fortunately not on anyrge scale. What that prince believed or disbelieved it is now

mpossible and perhaps unnecessary to discover; but this lastand of his central kingdom is not insignicant. The isolationthe Mercian was perhaps due to the fact that Christianityew from the eastern and western coasts. The eastern growthas, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had alreadyade Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The west-n grew from whatever was le of the British Christianity.

he two clashed, not in creed but in customs; and the Augus-nians ultimately prevailed. But the work from the west hadready been enormous. It is possible that some prestige wentth the possession of Glastonbury, which was like a piecethe Holy Land; but behind Glastonbury there was an evenander and more impressive power. There irradiated to all

urope at that time the glory of the golden age of Ireland.here the Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened ine Book of Kels four hundred years before its time. There the

ptism of the whole people had been a spontaneous popularstival which reads almost like a picnic; and thence cameowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almost literally like mennning with good news. This must be remembered throughe development of that dark dual destiny that has bound usIreland: for doubts have been thrown on a national unity

hich was not from the rst a political unity. But if Irelandas not one kingdom it was in reality one bishopric. Irelandas not converted but created by Christianity, as a stoneurch is created; and all its elements were gathered as under

garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was the moredividual because the religion was mere religion, without thecular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was

ways Romanist.ut indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more im-ediate subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the

nworldly things had any worldly success. The politics are aghtmare; the kings are unstable and the kingdoms shiing;d we are really never on solid ground except on conse-ated ground. The material ambitions are not only alwaysnfruitful but nearly always unfullled. The castles are allstles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on theound. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in thattraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways,be the key of our history. The time was to come when it

as to be rooted out of our country with a curious and careful

violence; and the modern English reader has therefore a veryfeeble idea of it and hence of the ages in which it worked.Even in these pages a word or two about its primary nature istherefore quite indispensable.

In the tremendous testament of our religion there are presentcertain ideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have inlater times produced wild sects professing an almost inhumanperfection on certain points; as in the Quakers who renouncethe right of self-defence, or the Communists who refuseany personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, the Christian

Church had from the rst dealt with these visions as beingspecial spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous.She reconciled them with natural human life by calling themspecially good, without admiing that the neglect of themwas necessarily bad. She took the view that it takes all sortsto make a world, even the religious world; and used the manwho chose to go without arms, family, or property as a sort ofexception that proved the rule. Now the interesting fact is thathe really did prove it. This madman who would not mind hisown business becomes the business man of the age. The veryword “monk” is a revolution, for it means solitude and cameto mean community — one might call it sociability. What hap-pened was that this communal life became a sort of reserveand refuge behind the individual life; a hospital for everykind of hospitality. We shall see later how this same functionof the common life was given to the common land. It is hardto nd an image for it in individualist times; but in private lifewe most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by

being outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely ip-pant to say that monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sortof sanctied league of aunts and uncles. It is a commonplacethat they did everything that nobody else would do; that theabbeys kept the world’s diary, faced the plagues of all esh,taught the rst technical arts, preserved the pagan literature,and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the

poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. Westill nd it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, butwe trust it to men who have made themselves rich, not to menwho have made themselves poor. Finally, the abbots and ab-

besses were elective. They introduced representative govern-ment, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a semi-sac-ramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our owninstitutions, we should see that the very notion of turning athousand men into one large man walking to Westminster isnot only an act or faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and eec-tive history of Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirelya history of its monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man byman, they taught and enriched the land. And then, about the

beginning of the ninth century, there came a turn, as of thetwinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all their work was invain.

That outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyondChristendom heaved another of its colossal and almostcosmic waves and swept everything away. Through all theeastern gates, le open, as it were, by the rst barbarianauxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmarkand Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians wereagain ooded by the unbaptized. All this time, it must beremembered, the actual central mechanism of Roman gov-ernment had been running down like a clock. It was really a

race between the driving energy of the missionaries on the



11

the defeat of the BarBarIans

edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of the city atthe centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped beforethe hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilizationwhich had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protec-tion perished unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrel-ling Saxons were smashed like sticks; Guthrum, the piratechief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the crown of East England,took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and towered in men-ace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The storythat follows, page aer page, is only the story of its despair

and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeatsalternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate thandefeats. It is only in one of these, the ne but fruitless victoryat Ashdown, that we rst see in the dim struggle, in a desper-ate and secondary part, the gure who has given his title tothe ultimate turning of the tide. For the victor was not thenthe king, but only the king’s younger brother. There is, fromthe rst, something humble and even accidental about Alfred.He was a great understudy. The interest of his early life lies inthis: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, andreadiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shiing combi-nations of all that period, with the aming patience of saintsin times of persecution. While he would dare anything for the

faith, he would bargain in anything except the faith. He wasa conqueror, with no ambition; an author only too glad to bea translator; a simple, concentrated, wary man, watching thefortunes of one thing, which he piloted both boldly and cau-tiously, and which he saved at last.

He had disappeared aer what appeared to be the nal hea-then triumph and selement, and is supposed to have lurkedlike an outlaw in a lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlandsof the Parret; towards those wild western lands to whichaboriginal races are held to have been driven by fate itself. ButAlfred, as he himself wrote in words that are his challenge tothe period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned with

fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spearsof the broken levies of the western shires, especially the menof Somerset; and in the spring of 878 he ung them at the lines

before the fenced camp of the victorious Danes at Ethandune.His sudden assault was as successful as that at Ashdown, andit was followed by a siege which was successful in a dierentand very denite sense. Guthrum, the conqueror of England,and all his important supports, were here penned behindtheir palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Dan-ish conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized,and the Treaty of Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex.The modern reader will smile at the baptism, and turn withgreater interest to the terms of the treaty. In this acute ai-

tude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong.He must support the tedium of frequent references to thereligious element in this part of English history, for withoutit there would never have been any English history at all.And nothing could clinch this truth more than the case of theDanes. In all the facts that followed, the baptism of Guthrumis really much more important than the Treaty of Wedmore.The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such did notendure; a century aerwards a Danish king like Canute wasreally ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown,he did not get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred’s reli-gious exaction that remained unalterable. And Canute himselfis actually now only remembered by men as a witness to the

futility of merely pagan power; as the king who put his ocrown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrenderheaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea.



12


V

St. Edward And The Norman Kings

he reader may be surprised at the disproportionate im-rtance given to the name which stands rst in the title ofis chapter. I put it there as the best way of emphasizing, at

e beginning of what we may call the practical part of ourstory, an elusive and rather strange thing. It can only bescribed as the strength of the weak kings.

is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to un-arn as well as to learn. I would ask the reader to forget hisading and everything that he learnt at school, and considere English monarchy as it would then appear to him. Let himppose that his acquaintance with the ancient kings has onlyme to him as it came to most men in simpler times, from

ursery tales, from the names of places, from the dedicationschurches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, ande tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person

ing upon some open and ordinary English way, such as thehames valley to Windsor, or visiting some old seats of cul-re, such as Oxford or Cambridge. One of the rst things, forstance, he would nd would be Eton, a place transformed,deed, by modern aristocracy, but still enjoying its mediævalealth and remembering its mediæval origin. If he askedout that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboyould know enough history to tell him that it was founded byenry VI. If he went to Cambridge and looked with his ownes for the college chapel which artistically towers above allhers like a cathedral, he would probably ask about it, and beld it was King’s College. If he asked which king, he wouldain be told Henry VI. If he then went into the library and

oked up Henry VI. in an encyclopædia, he would nd thate legendary giant, who had le these gigantic works behindm, was in history an almost invisible pigmy. Amid the vary-g and contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he ise only cipher. The contending factions carry him about likebale of goods. His desires do not seem to be even ascer-ned, far less satised. And yet his real desires are satisedstone and marble, in oak and gold, and remain throughthe maddest revolutions of modern England, while all the

mbitions of those who dictated to him have gone away likeust upon the wind.

dward the Confessor, like Henry VI., was not only an inval-

but almost an idiot. It is said that he was wan like an albino,d that the awe men had of him was partly that which is feltr a monster of mental deciency. His Christian charity wasthe kind that borders on anarchism, and the stories aboutm recall the Christian fools in the great anarchic novelsRussia. Thus he is reported to have covered the retreat of

common thief upon the naked plea that the thief neededings more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrastthe claims made for other kings, that the was impossibletheir dominions. Yet the two types of king are aerwardsaised by the same people; and the really arresting fact isat the incompetent king is praised the more highly of the

wo. And exactly as in the case of the last Lancastrian, we nd

at the praise has really a very practical meaning in the long

run. When we turn from the destructive to the constructiveside of the Middle Ages we nd that the village idiot is theinspiration of cities and civic systems. We nd his seal uponthe sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We nd theNorman victors in the hour of victory bowing before his veryghost. In the Tapestry of Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to

justify the Norman cause and glorify the Norman triumph,nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his conquestand the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the storyabruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Bale.

But over the bier of the decrepit zany, who died without strik-ing a blow, over this and this alone, is shown a hand comingout of heaven, and declaring the true approval of the powerthat rules the world.

The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, andin none more than in the false reputation of the “English”of that day. As I have indicated, there is some unreality intalking about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo-Saxon is amythical and straddling giant, who has presumably le onefootprint in England and the other in Saxony. But there was acommunity, or rather group of communities, living in Britain

before the Conquest under what we call Saxon names, and ofa blood probably more Germanic and certainly less Frenchthan the same communities aer the Conquest. And they havea modern reputation which is exactly the reverse of their realone. The value of the Anglo-Saxon is exaggerated, and yethis virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood is supposedto be the practical part of us; but as a fact the Anglo-Saxonswere more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their racialinuence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think thesame thing, heathen. But as a fact these “Teutons” were themystics. The Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only,thoroughly well, as they were ed to do it thoroughly well.They christened England. Indeed, they christened it before itwas born. The one thing the Angles obviously and certainly

could not manage to do was to become English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular disposi-tion to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them asour hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they didus, by thus opening our history, as it were, with the fable ofan age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles, as somany chronicles began, with the golden initial of a saint. By

becoming monks they served us in many very valuable andspecial capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the capacity ofancestors.

Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor hadpassed his early life, lay the lands of one of the most power-ful of the French king’s vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He

and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesqueand curious elements in European history, are confused formost of us by irrelevant controversies which would have

been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is theinane ction which gives the name of Norman to the Englisharistocracy during its great period of the last three hundredyears. Tennyson informed a lady of the name of Vere de Verethat simple faith was more valuable than Norman blood. Butthe historical student who can believe in Lady Clara as thepossessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large pos-sessor of the simple faith. As a maer of fact, as we shall seealso when we come to the political scheme of the Normans,

the notion is the negation of their real importance in history.



13

st. edward a nd the norman K Ings

The fashionable fancy misses what was best in the Normans,exactly as we have found it missing what was best in the Sax-ons. One does not know whether to thank the Normans morefor appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropists ever

became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Nor-man adventurer that he threw himself heartily into his chanceposition; and had faith not only in his comrades, but in hissubjects, and even in his enemies. He was loyal to the king-dom he had not yet made. Thus the Norman Bruce becomes aScot; thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbow becomes

an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived asremaining as a superior caste until the present time. But thisalien and adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appearsin these other national histories, appears most strongly of allin the history we have here to follow. The Duke of Normandydoes become a real King of England; his claim through theConfessor, his election by the Council, even his symbolichandfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether emptyforms. And though both phrases would be inaccurate, it isvery much nearer the truth to call William the rst of the Eng-lish than to call Harold the last of them.

An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixedwithout record in that dim epoch, has made much of the factthat the Norman edges of France, like the East Anglian edgesof England, were deeply penetrated by the Norse invasionsof the ninth century; and that the ducal house of Normandy,with what other families we know not, can be traced back toa Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincyand creative legislation which belonged to the Normans,whoever they were, may be connected reasonably enoughwith some infusion of fresh blood. But if the racial theoristspress the point to a comparison of races, it can obviously only

be answered by a study of the two types in separation. And itmust surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since

been shown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian

blood than by the Scandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much ghting (and more ruling) was done by theCrusaders who were never Vikings as by the Vikings whowere 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 na-tionality, so long as we rmly understand the ultimate historicfact that the duchy of Normandy was about as Scandinavianas the town of Norwich. But the debate has another danger, inthat it tends to exaggerate even the personal importance of theNorman. Many as were his talents as a master, he is in historythe servant of other and wider things. The landing of Lanfrancis perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And

Lanfranc was an Italian — like Julius Cæsar. The Norman isnot in history a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of amere empire. The Norman is a gate. He is like one of thosegates which still remain as he made them, with round archand rude paern and stout supporting columns; and whatentered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has inhistory a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy orKing of England. He was what Julius Cæsar was, and what St.Augustine was: he was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.

William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that con-nection which followed naturally from his Norman education,had promised the English crown to the holder of the Norman

dukedom. Whether he did or not we shall probably never

know: it is not intrinsically impossible or even improbabTo blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was givenread duties dened at a much later date into the rst feuchaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like epecting the Ancient Britons to sing “Rule Britannia.” Wilfurther clinched his case by declaring that Harold, the prpal Saxon noble and the most probable Saxon claimant, hwhile enjoying the Duke’s hospitality aer a shipwreck, supon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke’s claim. Abouepisode also we must agree that we do not know; yet we

be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do ncare. The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Hold probably aected the Pope when he blessed a bannerWilliam’s army; but it did not aect the Pope much moreit would have aected the people; and Harold’s people qas much as William’s. Harold’s people presumably deniethe fact; and their denial is probably the motive of the vemarked and almost eager emphasis with which the BayeTapestry asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal btrayal. There is here a rather arresting fact to be noted. Apart of this celebrated pictorial record is not concerned awith the well-known historical events which we have onnote rapidly here. It does, indeed, dwell a lile on the de

of Edward; it depicts the diculties of William’s enterpriin the felling of forests for shipbuilding, in the crossing othe Channel, and especially in the charge up the hill at Hings, in which full justice is done to the destructive resistof Harold’s army. But it was really aer Duke William hadisembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, thhe did what is historically worthy to be called the ConquIt is not until these later operations that we have the notethe new and scientic militarism from the Continent. Insof marching upon London he marched round it; and crosthe Thames at Wallingford cut o the city from the rest ocountry and compelled its surrender. He had himself eleking with all the forms that would have accompanied a p

ful succession to the Confessor, and aer a brief return toNormandy took up the work of war again to bring all Enunder his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid wathe northern counties, seized Chester, and made rather thwon a kingdom. These things are the foundations of histcal England; but of these things the pictures woven in hoof his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux Tapestry may al

be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But it tells igreat detail the tale of some trivial raid into Briany solethat Harold and William may appear as brothers in armsand especially that William may be depicted in the very aof giving arms to Harold. And here again there is much msignicance than a modern reader may fancy, in its beariupon the new birth of that time and the ancient symbolisarms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the Kof France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key secular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most munous vassal, and a vein of such mutiny runs through his ily fortunes: his sons Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him winternal ambitions antagonistic to his own. But it would b

blunder to allow such personal broils to obscure the systwhich had indeed existed here before the Conquest, whiclaried and conrmed it. That system we call Feudalism

That Feudalism was the main mark of the Middle Ages icommonplace of fashionable information; but it is of the



14


at seeks the past rather in Wardour Street than Watlingreet. For that maer, the very term “mediæval” is used formost anything from Early English to Early Victorian. An

minent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which is likeplying it to our aeroplanes. Similarly the just description ofudalism, and of how far it was a part and how far rather an

mpediment in the main mediæval movement, is confused byrrent debates about quite modern things — especially thatodern thing, the English squirearchy. Feudalism was veryarly the opposite of squirearchy. For it is the whole point of

e squire that his ownership is absolute and is pacic. And itthe very denition of Feudalism that it was a tenure, and anure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel insteadgold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of their

ndlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in theodern sense; every one was practically as well as theoreti-lly a tenant of the King; and even he oen fell into a feudalferiority to a Pope or an Emperor. To call it mere tenure byldiering may seem a simplication; but indeed it is preciselyre that it was not so simple as it seems. It is precisely a cer-n knot or enigma in the nature of Feudalism which makeslf the struggle of European history, but especially Englishstory.

here was a certain unique type of state and culture whiche call mediæval, for want of a beer word, which we seethe Gothic or the great Schoolmen. This thing in itself wasove all things logical. Its very cult of authority was a thingreason, as all men who can reason themselves instantlycognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny its premises or dis-

ke its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact about who hade authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical, and wasver quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism

ready ourished before the mediæval renascence began. Itas, if not the forest the mediævals had to clear, at least thede timber with which they had to build. Feudalism was a

ghting growth of the Dark Ages before the Middle Ages; thee of barbarians resisted by semi-barbarians. I do not say thisdisparagement of it. Feudalism was mostly a very humaning; the nearest contemporary name for it was homage,word which almost means humanity. On the other hand,ediæval logic, never quite reconciled to it, could becomeits extremes inhuman. It was oen mere prejudice thatotected men, and pure reason that burned them. The feudal

nits grew through the lively localism of the Dark Ages, whenlls without roads shut in a valley like a garrison. Patriotismd to be parochial; for men had no country, but only a coun-

yside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king; but ited not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. And

would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element inudalism in English history. For it is the one kind of freedomat the English have had and held.

he knot in the system was something like this. In theory theng owned everything, like an earthly providence; and thatade for despotism and “divine right,” which meant in sub-ance a natural authority. In one aspect the King was simplye one lord anointed by the Church, that is recognized by thehics of the age. But while there was more royalty in theory,ere could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was muchore equal than in our age of munitions, and the variousoups could arm almost instantly with bows from the forest

spears from the smith. Where men are military there is no

militarism. But it is more vital that while the kingdom was inthis sense one territorial army, the regiments of it were alsokingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hence theloyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king

be a demagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle isresponsible for the tragic passions about betrayal, as in thecase of William and Harold; the alleged traitor who is alwaysfound to be recurrent, yet always felt to be exceptional. To

break the tie was at once easy and terrible. Treason in thesense of rebellion was then really felt as treason in the sense

of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual baleeld.Now, there was even more of this civil war in English than inother 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, or whether the Roman imprint had really been lighterthan in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth prevented even a fullaempt to build the Civitas Dei , or ideal mediæval state. Whatemerged was a compromise, which men long aerwardsamused themselves by calling a constitution.

There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in criticism, and which may safely even be empha-sized so long as they are not isolated. One of these I havecalled at the beginning of this chapter the strength of the weakkings. And there is a complement of it, even in this crisis ofthe Norman mastery, which might well be called the weaknessof the strong kings. William of Normandy succeeded imme-diately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in hishuge success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long aerhis death. It was certainly his single aim to simplify Englandinto a popular autocracy, like that growing up in France; withthat aim he scaered the feudal holdings in scraps, demandeda direct vow from the sub-vassals to himself, and used anytool against the barony, from the highest culture of the foreignecclesiastics to the rudest relics of Saxon custom. But the very

parallel of France makes the paradox startlingly apparent. Itis a proverb that the rst French kings were puppets; that themayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of the king.Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular idolof unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles

bent or were broken. In France arose absolute government,the more because it was not precisely personal government.The King was already a thing — like the Republic. Indeed themediæval Republics were rigid with divine right. In NormanEngland, perhaps, the government was too personal to beabsolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense inwhich William the Conqueror was William the Conquered.When his two sons were dead, the whole country fell into a

feudal chaos almost like that before the Conquest. In Francethe princes who had been slaves became something exceptional like priests; and one of them became a saint. But somehowour greatest kings were still barons; and by that very energyour barons became our kings.



15

the age of the crusades

VI

The Age Of The Crusades

The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with thename of St. Edward; and this one might very well begin withthe name of St. George. His rst appearance, it is said, as a pa-

tron of our people, occurred at the instance of Richard Coeurde Lion during his campaign in Palestine; and this, as we shallsee, really stands for a new England which might well have anew saint. But the Confessor is a character in English history;whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology asa Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in anyhistory. And if we wish to understand the noblest and mostneglected of human revolutions, we can hardly get closer toit than by considering this paradox, of how much progressand enlightenment was represented by thus passing from achronicle to a romance.

In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a

phrase as I have just read in a newspaper controversy: “Sal-vation, like other good things, must not come from outside.”To call a spiritual thing external and not internal is the chiefmode of modernist excommunication. But if our subject ofstudy is mediæval and not modern, we must pit against thisapparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put our-selves in the posture of men who thought that almost everygood thing came from outside — like good news. I confess thatI am not impartial in my sympathies here; and that the news-paper phrase I quoted strikes me as a blunder about the verynature of life. I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a

baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; northat a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and

denying its dependence on God or other good things. I wouldmaintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; andthat gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. But this faithin receptiveness, and in respect for things outside oneself,need here do no more than help me in explaining what anyversion of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothingis the modern German more modern, or more mad, than inhis dream of nding a German name for everything; eatinghis language, or in other words biting his tongue. And innothing were the mediævals more free and sane than in theiracceptance of names and emblems from outside their most

beloved limits. The monastery would oen not only take inthe stranger but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like

Bruce was enthroned and thanked as if he had really come asa knight errant. And a passionately patriotic community moreoen than not had a foreigner for a patron saint. Thus crowdsof saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an Irishman.Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they le thenumberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over

by comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solidfame of Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero, striving inan eastern desert against an impossible monster.

That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. Intheir romance and reality they were the rst English experi-ence of learning, not only from the external, but the remote.

England, like every Christian thing, had thriven on outer

things without shame. From the roads of Cæsar to the ches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But noweagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughtthey were seeking the strange things instead of receivingthem. The English had stepped from acceptance to advenand the epic of their ships had begun. The scope of the greligious movement which swept England along with allWest would distend a book like this into huge disproporyet it would be much beer to do so than to dismiss it in distant and frigid fashion common in such short summar

The inadequacy of our insular method in popular historyperfectly shown in the treatment of Richard Coeur de LioHis tale is told with the implication that his departure forthe Crusade was something like the escapade of a schoolrunning away to sea. It was, in this view, a pardonable orlovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like a responEnglishman now going to the Front. Christendom was none nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richahimself was of an adventurous and even romantic tempetrue, though it is not unreasonably romantic for a born soto do the work he does best. But the point of the argumenagainst insular history is particularly illustrated here by tabsence of a continental comparison. In this case we have

to step across the Straits of Dover to nd the fallacy. PhiliAugustus, Richard’s contemporary in France, had the nama particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesmyet Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reaswas, of course, that the Crusades were, for all thoughtfulEuropeans, things of the highest statesmanship and the ppublic spirit.

Some six hundred years aer Christianity sprang up in tEast and swept westwards, another great faith arose in athe same eastern lands and followed it like its gigantic show. Like a shadow, it was at once a copy and a contrary. Wcall it Islam, or the creed of the Moslems; and perhaps its

explanatory description is that it was the nal aming upthe accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the accumulatHebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more pean, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its highmotive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation itself an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idof God being made esh and of His being aerwards mawood or stone. A study of the questions smouldering in ttrack of the prairie re of the Christian conversion favousuggestion that this fanaticism against art or mythology at once a development and a reaction from that conversioa sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islwas something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies

been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnatiorescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at thexpense of the sincerity of his soul. And the Greek Iconochad poured into Italy, breaking the popular statues and dnouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed, in a styleciently symbolic, by the sword of the father of CharlemIt was all these disappointed negations that took re fromgenius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lancavalry charge that nearly conquered the world. And if itsuggested that a note on such Oriental origins is rather refrom a history of England, the answer is that this book malas! contain many digressions, but that this is not a digrsion. It is quite peculiarly necessary to keep in mind that



16


mite god haunted Christianity like a ghost; to remember itevery European corner, but especially in our corner. If anye doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the par-

h churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, andk why this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glassgone. He will soon learn that it was lately, and in his ownnes and homesteads, that the ecstasy of the deserts returned,d his bleak northern island was lled with the fury of the

onoclasts.

was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplic-

y of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home wasmeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads,d it went everywhere because it came from nowhere. Butthe Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic qualityIslam was masked by a high civilization, more scientic if

ss creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christen-m. The Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the

ore rationalist religion of the two. This rootless renementas characteristically advanced in abstract things, of which aemory remains in the very name of algebra. In comparisone Christian civilization was still largely instinctive, but itsstincts were very strong and very much the other way. Itas full of local aections, which found form in that system ofnces which runs like a paern through everything mediæval,om heraldry to the holding of land. There was a shape andlour in all their customs and statutes which can be seen intheir tabards and escutcheons; something at once strictd gay. This is not a departure from the interest in externalings, but rather a part of it. The very welcome they would

en give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a recogni-on of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sucient

not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. Thehinese called the white man “a sky-breaker.” The mediævalirit loved its part in life as a part, not a whole; its charter forcame from something else. There is a joke about a Benedic-

ne monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat ,hereupon the unleered Franciscan triumphantly retortedanciscus Franciscat. It is something of a parable of mediævalstory; for if there were a verb Franciscare it would be anproximate description of what St. Francis aerwards did.

ut that more individual mysticism was only approaching itsrth, and Benedictus benedicat is very precisely the moo ofe earliest mediævalism. I mean that everything is blessedom beyond, by something which has in its turn been blessedom beyond again; only the blessed bless. But the pointhich is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for them theyond was not the innite, as in a modern religion. Everyyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold

the human heart, was as much present in the most etherealings of Christendom as it was absent from the most practicalings of Islam. England would derive a thing from France,ance from Italy, Italy from Greece, Greece from Palestine,lestine from Paradise. It was not merely that a yeoman of

ent would have his house hallowed by the priest of the par-h church, which was conrmed by Canterbury, which wasnrmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, asthe pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the myste-

ous cradle of her creed, to a land of which the very earth waslled holy. And when she looked eastward for it she saw thece of Mahound. She saw standing in the place that was herrthly heaven a devouring giant out of the deserts, to whom

all places were the same.

It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotionsof the Crusade, because the modern English reader is widelycut o from these particular feelings of his fathers; and thereal quarrel of Christendom and Islam, the re-baptism of theyoung nations, could not otherwise be seized in its uniquecharacter. It was nothing so simple as a quarrel between twomen who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the much deadlierquarrel between one man who wanted it and another manwho could not see why it was wanted. The Moslem, of course,

had his own holy places; but he has never felt about them asWesterns can feel about a eld or a roof-tree; he thought ofthe holiness as holy, not of the places as places. The austeritywhich forbade him imagery, the wandering war that forbadehim rest, shut him o from all that was breaking out and blos-soming in our local patriotisms; just as it has given the Turksan empire without ever giving them a nation.

Now, the eect of this adventure against a mighty and mys-terious enemy was simply enormous in the transformationof England, as of all the nations that were developing side byside with England. Firstly, we learnt enormously from whatthe Saracen did. Secondly, we learnt yet more enormously

from what the Saracen did not do. Touching some of the goodthings which we lacked, we were fortunately able to followhim. But in all the good things which he lacked, we wereconrmed like adamant to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right they were till they went to warwith Moslems. At once the most obvious and the most repre-sentative reaction was the reaction which produced the bestof what we call Christian Art; and especially those grotesquesof Gothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking.The East as an environment, as an impersonal glamour, cer-tainly stimulated the Western mind, but stimulated it ratherto break the Moslem commandment than to keep it. It was asif the Christian were impelled, like a caricaturist, to cover all

that faceless ornament with faces; to give heads to all thoseheadless serpents and birds to all these lifeless trees. Statuaryquickened and came to life under the veto of the enemy as un-der a benediction. The image, merely because it was called anidol, became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfoldhost of stone sprang up all over the shrines and streets of Eu-rope. The Iconoclasts made more statues than they destroyed.

The place of Coeur de Lion in popular fable and gossip isfar more like his place in true history than the place of themere denationalized ne’er-do-weel given him in our utilitar-ian school books. Indeed the vulgar rumour is nearly alwaysmuch nearer the historical truth than the “educated” opinion

of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. King Richard,as the typical Crusader, did make a momentous dierenceto England by gaining glory in the East, instead of devotinghimself conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplarymanner of King John. The accident of his military geniusand prestige gave England something which it kept for fourhundred years, and without which it is incomprehensiblethroughout that period — the reputation of being in the veryvanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table,the aachment of knighthood to the name of a British king,

belong to this period. Richard was not only a knight but atroubadour; and culture and courtesy were linked up withthe idea of English valour. The mediæval Englishman was

even proud of being polite; which is at least no worse than



17

the age of the crusades

being proud of money and bad manners, which is what manyEnglishmen in our later centuries have meant by their com-mon sense.

Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. It was anaempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholiccreed into a military system which already existed; to turn itsdiscipline into an initiation and its inequalities into a hier-archy. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs,of course, that considerable cultus of the dignity of woman,to which the word “chivalry” is oen narrowed, or perhaps

exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gapsin the more polished civilization of the Saracens. Moslemsdenied even souls to women; perhaps from the same instinctwhich recoiled from the sacred birth, with its inevitable glori-cation of the mother; perhaps merely because, having origi-nally had tents rather than houses, they had slaves rather thanhousewives. It is false to say that the chivalric view of womenwas merely an aectation, except in the sense in which theremust always be an aectation where there is an ideal. It is theworst sort of superciality not to see the pressure of a generalsentiment merely because it is always broken up by events;the Crusade itself, for example, is more present and potentas a dream even than as a reality. From the rst Plantagenetto the last Lancastrian it haunts the minds of English kings,giving as a background to their bales a mirage of Palestine.So a devotion like that of Edward I. to his queen was quite areal motive in the lives of multitudes of his contemporaries.When crowds of enlightened tourists, seing forth to sneer atthe superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and label-ling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of theStrand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wiveswith a more owing courtesy than their fathers in Edward’stime, or whether they pause to meditate on the legend of ahusband’s sorrow, to be found in the very name of CharingCross.

But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusadesconcerned only that crust of society for which heraldry wasan art and chivalry an etiquee. The direct contrary is the fact.The First Crusade especially was much more an unanimouspopular rising than most that are called riots and revolutions.The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the time, oenowed their increasing power to corporate ghting for theCross; but I shall deal with such things later. Oen it was notso much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like newgipsies moving eastwards. And it has passed into a proverbthat children by themselves oen organized a crusade as theynow organize a charade. But we shall best realize the fact byfancying every Crusade as a Children’s Crusade. They were

full of all that the modern world worships in children, becauseit has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the rudestremains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that weall saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later,for instance, in the lanced and laiced interiors of Memling,

but it is ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious con-temporary art; something that domesticated distant landsand made the horizon at home. They ed into the corners ofsmall houses the ends of the earth and the edges of the sky.Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is perspective; itis not the decorative atness of orientalism. In a word, theirworld, like a child’s, is full of foreshortening, as of a short cut

to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than pictures.

Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are peis impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphereit was an atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precthese outlandish visions that truly came home to everyboit was the royal councils and feudal quarrels that were coparatively remote. The Holy Land was much nearer to a man’s house than Westminster, and immeasurably neareRunymede. To give a list of English kings and parliamenwithout pausing for a moment upon this prodigious presof a religious transguration in common life, is somethin

folly of which can but faintly be conveyed by a more modparallel, with secularity and religion reversed. It is as if sClericalist or Royalist writer should give a list of the Arch

bishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting how one died small-pox, another of old age, another by a curious acciddecapitation, and throughout all his record should nevermention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revotion.



18


VII

The Problem of the Plantagenets

is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criti-sm in all branches to proclaim that certain popular texts andthorities are “late,” and therefore apparently worthless.

wo similar events are always the same event, and the laterone is even credible. This fanaticism is oen in mere factistaken; it ignores the most common coincidences of hu-an life: and some future critic will probably say that the talethe Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiel Tower,cause there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Parishibition. Most of the mediæval remains familiar to the mod-n reader are necessarily “late,” such as Chaucer or the Robinood ballads; but they are none the less, to a wiser criticism,orthy of aention and even trust. That which lingers aerepoch is generally that which lived most luxuriantly inIt is an excellent habit to read history backwards. It is farser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages backwards

om Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and whot is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to aempt to readem forwards from Cædmon, of whom he can know nothing,d of whom even the authorities he must trust know very

le. If this be true of Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course,Chaucer. If we really want to know what was strongest ine twelh century, it is no bad way to ask what remainedit in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns to the

Canterbury Tales,” which are still as amusing as Dickenst as mediæval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very rst

uestion to be asked? Why, for instance, are they called Can-rbury Tales; and what were the pilgrims doing on the roadCanterbury? They were, of course, taking part in a popular

stival like a modern public holiday, though much morenial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to acceptas a self-evident step in progress that their holidays wererived from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.

is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means ary good man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, con-tent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolution-y image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity, and need-g, as do so many things of this older society, some almosteposterous modern parallel to give its original freshnessd point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar likee Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that thero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness andlarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came downe street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, weould think it odd to be told that he had been very patientth a half-wied maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime im-ssibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Chris-n idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especiallyrealized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it

as also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almoste same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not neede sword or sceptre, but rather the sta or spade. It was the

mbition of poverty. All this must be approximately visual-ed before we catch a glimpse of the great eects of the storyhich lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.

The rst few lines of Chaucer’s poem, to say nothing of thou-sands in the course of it, make it instantly plain that it was nocase of secular revels still linked by a slight ritual to the nameof some forgoen god, as may have happened in the pagandecline. Chaucer and his friends did think about St. Thomas,at least more frequently than a clerk at Margate thinks aboutSt. Lubbock. They did denitely believe in the bodily cureswrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as rmly asthe most enlightened and progressive modern can believe inthose of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the

whole of that society is thus seen in the act of moving; andwhy was he so important? If there be a streak of sincerity inthe claim to teach social and democratic history, instead of astring of kings and bales, this is the obvious and open gate

by which to approach the gure which disputed England withthe rst Plantagenet. A real popular history should think moreof his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionablythousands of ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, asin the motley crowd of Chaucer, knew a great deal about St.Thomas when they had never even heard of Becket.

It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as thefeudal tangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeatedthe unifying eort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy

to write of the Red King’s hunting instead of his building,which has lasted longer, and which he probably loved muchmore. It is easy to catalogue the questions he disputed withAnselm — leaving out the question Anselm cared most about,and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as, “Why wasGod a man?” All this is as simple as saying that a king died ofeating lampreys, from which, however, there is lile to learnnowadays, unless it be that when a modern monarch perishesof gluony the newspapers seldom say so. But if we wantto know what really happened to England in this dim ep-och, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of St.Thomas of Canterbury.

Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into themonarchy, brought also a refreshment of the idea for whichthe French have always stood: the idea in the Roman Law ofsomething impersonal and omnipresent. It is the thing wesmile at even in a small French detective story; when Justiceopens a handbag or Justice runs aer a cab. Henry II. reallyproduced this impression of being a police force in person;a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the

bird and the sh of scripture whose way no man knoweth.Kinghood, however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal atleast was a justice cheap and obvious as daylight, an atmo-sphere which lingers only in popular phrases about the King’sEnglish or the King’s highway. But though it tended to be

egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be humanitarian. Inmodern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name of Jus-tice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially isalways a Revolutionist — and never an Anarchist. Now this ef-fort of kings like Henry II. to rebuild on a plan like that of theRoman Law was not only, of course, crossed and entangled bycountless feudal fancies and feelings in themselves as well asothers, it was also conditioned by what was the corner-stoneof the whole civilization. It had to happen not only with butwithin the Church. For a Church was to these men rathera world they lived in than a building to which they went.Without the Church the Middle Ages would have had no law,as without the Church the Reformation would have had no

Bible. Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman



19

the ProBLem of the PLantagenets

Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yet therewas another element in the Church, stored in its rst founda-tions like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy andrenew the world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran downthe ages parallel to all its political compromises. Monasticismitself was the throwing o of innumerable Utopias, withoutposterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as was proved recur-rently aer corrupt epochs, a strange secret of geing poorquickly; a mushroom magnicence of destitution. This windof revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assissi

and stripped him of his rich garments in the street. The samewind of revolution suddenly smote Thomas Becket, KingHenry’s brilliant and luxurious Chancellor, and drove him onto an unearthly glory and a bloody end.

Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is reallyvery practical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore himfrom his friend’s side cannot be appreciated in the light ofthose legal and constitutional debates which the misfortunesof the seventeenth century have made so much of in morerecent history. To convict St. Thomas of illegality and cleri-cal intrigue, when he set the law of the Church against thatof the State, is about as adequate as to convict St. Francis of

bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and

moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to sayso even in that much more logical age, but it is no sucientway of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomasof Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist,

but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed andhis vision was not fullled. We are therefore told in the text-

books lile more than that he wrangled with the King aboutcertain regulations; the most crucial being whether “crimi-nous clerks” should be punished by the State or the Church.And this was indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realiseit we must reiterate what is hardest for modern England tounderstand — the nature of the Catholic Church when it wasitself a government, and the permanent sense in which it was

itself a revolution.

It is always the rst fact that escapes notice; and the rst factabout the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon,where the State could only work with a machinery of pun-ishment. It claimed to be a divine detective who helped thecriminal to escape by a plea of guilty. It was, therefore, in thevery nature of the institution, that when it did punish materi-ally it punished more lightly. If any modern man were put

back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly betorn in two; for if the King’s scheme was the more rational, theArchbishop’s was the more humane. And despite the hor-rors that darkened religious disputes long aerwards, this

character was certainly in the bulk the historic character ofChurch government. It is admied, for instance, that thingslike eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, was practicallyunknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principlelingered into more evil days in the form by which the Churchauthorities handed over culprits to the secular arm to bekilled, even for religious oences. In modern romances this istreated as a mere hypocrisy; but the man who treats every hu-man inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite abouthis own inconsistencies.

Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any morethan St. Francis, without accepting very simply a amingand even fantastic charity, by which the great Archbishop

undoubtedly stands for the victims of this world, where wheel of fortune grinds the faces of the poor. He may wehave been too idealistic; he wished to protect the Churcha sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem King as capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest too idealistic, the King was really too practical; it is intrincally true to say he was too practical to succeed in practicThere re-enters here, and runs, I think, through all Englishistory, the rather indescribable truth I have suggested ab

the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly impersonalenough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediævstory is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle’s vision of a stostrong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Ostrong men were too strong for us, and too strong for theselves. They were too strong for their own aim of a just aequal monarchy. The smith broke upon the anvil the swostate that he was hammering for himself. Whether or no will serve as a key to the very complicated story of our kand barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. to his rival

became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, thin a colder and more remote manner, for the whole peopagainst feudal oppression; and if his policy had succeede

its purity, it would at least have made impossible the privlege and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlesswhich stamped and spurned the furniture was a symbol him; it was some such thing that prevented him and his hfrom siing as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. LHe thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of thpriests’ Utopianism like a man ghting a ghost; he answetranscendental deances with baser material persecutionand at last, on a dark and, I think, decisive day in Englishhistory, his word sent four feudal murderers into the cloiof Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor and wcreated a saint.

At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only

called an epidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated this the same evidence as for half the facts of history; and aone denying them must deny them upon a dogma. But sthing followed which would seem to modern civilizationmore monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can imagineCecil Rhodes submiing to be horsewhipped by a Boer inPaul’s Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible deincidental to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idof what was meant when Henry II. was beaten by monksthe tomb of his vassal and enemy. The modern parallel caup is comic, but the truth is that mediæval actualities hava violence that does seem comic to our conventions. TheCatholics of that age were driven by two dominant thougthe all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and tall-importance of vivid and evident external acts as a propenitence. Extravagant humiliation aer extravagant pridthem restored the balance of sanity. The point is worth sting, because without it moderns make neither head nor tof the period. Green gravely suggests, for instance, of Heancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds werfurther blackened by “low superstition,” which led him tdragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screamfor the mercy of God. Mediævals would simply have saidsuch a man might well scream for it, but his scream was only logical comment he could make. But they would haquite refused to see why the scream should be added to t



20


ns and not subtracted from them. They would have thoughtsimply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man foring horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.

ut it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubtoper to ignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King’sstice lost more by the death of St. Thomas than was instantlyparent in the horror of Christendom, the canonization ofe victim and the public penance of the tyrant. These thingsdeed were in a sense temporary; the King recovered thewer to judge clerics, and many later kings and justiciars

ntinued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as assible clue to puzzling aer events, that here and by this

urderous stroke the crown lost what should have been theent and massive support of its whole policy. I mean that itst the people.

need not be repeated that the case for despotism is demo-atic. As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to theeak. An autocrat cannot be judged as a historical character

his relations with other historical characters. His true ap-ause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage ofistocracy, but from that enormous audience which mustways sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king wholps numberless helps nameless men, and when he ings hisdest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. Thisrt of monarchy was certainly a mediæval ideal, nor need itcessarily fail as a reality. French kings were never so merci-l to the people as when they were merciless to the peers;d it is probably true that a Czar who was a great lord to histimates was oen a lile father in innumerable lile homes.is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power,ough it might at last have deserved destruction in Englandin France, would in England as in France have preventede few from seizing and holding all the wealth and power tois day. But in England it broke o short, through somethingwhich the slaying of St. Thomas may well have been the

preme example. It was something overstrained and star-ng and against the instincts of the people. And of what waseant in the Middle Ages by that very powerful and ratherculiar thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.

any case this conjecture nds support in the ensuingents. It is not merely that, just as the great but personalan of the Conqueror collapsed aer all into the chaos ofe Stephen transition, so the great but personal plan of thest Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Barons’ Wars.hen all allowance is made for constitutional ctions and

erthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the rst timeme moral strength deserted the monarchy. The characterHenry’s second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the

st chapter) stamped it with something accidental and yetmbolic. It was not that John was a mere black blot on the

ure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture was much moreixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited Plan-genet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was notat he was much more of a bad man than many opposedhim, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad men andod do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the

gal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long aer-ards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong.obody suggested that the barons of Stephen’s time starveden in dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them

p by the heels as a symbolic request for a free parliament. In

the reign of John and his son it was still the barons, and notin the least the people, who seized the power; but there did

begin to appear a case for their seizing it, for contemporariesas well as constitutional historians aerwards. John, in oneof his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papalcare, as an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope,whose counsels had generally been mild and liberal, was thenin his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor and wantedevery penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessingto Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island as a

mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other maersthe baronial party began to have something like a principle,which is the backbone of a policy. Much conventional his-tory that connects their councils with a thing like our Houseof Commons is as far-fetched as it would be to say that theSpeaker wields a Mace like those which the barons bran-dished in bale. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast forthe Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was anenthusiast for something. He founded a parliament in a t ofconsiderable absence of mind; but it was with true presence ofmind, in the responsible and even religious sense which hadmade his father so savage a Crusader against heretics, that helaid about him with his great sword before he fell at Evesham.

Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was astep away from despotism. If we hold that double truth rmlywe have something like a key to the rest of English history. Arather loose aristocracy not only gained but oen deservedthe name of liberty. And the history of the English can be most

briey summarized by taking the French moo of “Liberty,Equality, and Fraternity,” and noting that the English havesincerely loved the rst and lost the other two.

In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crown and the new and more national rally ofthe nobility. But it was a complication, whereas a miracle isa plain maer that any man can understand. The possibili-

ties or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were le a riddlefor history; the white ame of his audacious theocracy wasfrustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale le untold.But his memory passed into the care of the common people,and with them he was more active dead than alive — yes, evenmore busy. In the next chapter we shall consider what wasmeant in the Middle Ages by the common people, and howuncommon we should think it to-day. And in the last chapterwe have already seen how in the Crusading age the strangestthings grew homely, and men fed on travellers’ tales whenthere were no national newspapers. A many-coloured pageantof martyrology on numberless walls and windows had famil-iarized the most ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes;

with a bishop ayed by Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens,with one saint stoned by Jews and another hewn in pieces bynegroes. I cannot think it was a small maer that among theseimages one of the most magnicent had met his death butlately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at leastsomething akin to the primitive and epical romances of thatperiod in the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whomstruck too hard and slew the other. It may even have been soearly as this that something was judged in silence; and for themultitude rested on the Crown a mysterious seal of insecuritylike that of Cain, and of exile on the English kings.



21

the meanIng of merry e ngLand

VIII

The Meaning of Merry England

The mental trick by which the rst half of English history has been wholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple one.It consists in telling only the story of the professional destroy-

ers and then complaining that the whole story is one of de-struction. A king is at the best a sort of crowned executioner;all government is an ugly necessity; and if it was then uglierit was for the most part merely because it was more dicult.What we call the Judges’ circuits were rst rather the King’sraids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinarycivil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. Whenthe social enemy was caught at all he was killed or savagelymaimed. The King could not take Pentonville Prison aboutwith him on wheels. I am far from denying that there was areal element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; but the point hereis that it was concerned with one side of life, which is cruel atthe best; and that this involved more cruelty for the same rea-

son that it involved more courage. When we think of our an-cestors as the men who inicted tortures, we ought sometimesto think of them as the men who deed them. But the moderncritic of mediævalism commonly looks only at these crookedshadows and not at the common daylight of the Middle Ages.When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the factthat ghters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumesthat any other ideas there may have been were ineectual andfruitless. He despises the monk for avoiding the very sameactivities which he despises the warrior for cultivating. Andhe insists that the arts of war were sterile, without even admit-ting the possibility that the arts of peace were productive. But

the truth is that it is precisely in the arts of peace, and in thetype of production, that the Middle Ages stand singular andunique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed man mustrecognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens tohate it. The melodramatic things currently called mediævalare much older and more universal; such as the sport oftournament or the use of torture. The tournament was indeeda Christian and liberal advance on the gladiatorial show, sincethe lords risked themselves and not merely their slaves. Tor-ture, so far from being peculiarly mediæval, was copied frompagan 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

thing common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the greatagnostic empire of China. What was really arresting andremarkable about the Middle Ages, as the Spartan disciplinewas peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian communes typical ofRussia, was precisely its positive social scheme of production,of the making, building and growing of all the good things oflife.

For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch onmediæval England at all. The dynasties and the parliamentspassed like a changing cloud and across a stable and fruit-ful landscape. The institutions which aected the masses can

be compared to corn or fruit trees in one practical sense atleast, that they grew upwards from below. There may have

been beer societies, and assuredly we have not to look ffor worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We cannot do justice, for instance, to the logovernment of that epoch, even where it was very faultyfragmentary, by any comparisons with the plans of local ernment laid down to-day. Modern local government alwcomes from above; it is at best granted; it is more oen mimposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern GerEmpire, are necessarily more ecient in making municipties upon a plan, or rather a paern. The mediævals not o

had self-government, but their self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of the natiomonarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp ostate approval; but it was approval of a popular fact alreain existence. Men banded together in guilds and parisheslong before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Likcharity, which was worked in the same way, their Home

began at home. The reactions of recent centuries have lemost educated men bankrupt of the corporate imaginatiorequired even to imagine this. They only think of a mob aa thing that breaks things — even if they admit it is right

break them. But the mob made these things. An artist moas many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, cre

these masterpieces. And if the modern sceptic, in his detetion of the democratic ideal, complains of my calling themmasterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serveis enough to reply that the very word “masterpiece” is borowed from the terminology of the mediæval crasmen. such points in the Guild System can be considered a lilelater; here we are only concerned with the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social institutions, sucthey were. They rose in the streets like a silent rebellion; a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional counthere are practically no political institutions thus given bthe people; all are received by the people. There is only othing that stands in our midst, aenuated and threatened

enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle AgeTrades Unions.

In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like auniversal landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastroof geology it may be said that the land had slid uphill. Rucivilization was on a wholly new and much higher level;there was no great social convulsions or apparently evensocial campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a solitary insin history of men thus falling upwards; at least of outcasting on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised laSuch a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yif we go by conscious political plans, it was something lik

a miracle. There had appeared, like a subterranean race cup to the sun, something unknown to the august civilizaof the Roman Empire — a peasantry. At the beginning of Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now groChristian was as much a slave state as old South CarolinaBy the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state opeasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had beenpassed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemneddenition; no war had been waged against it, no new racruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startand silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast imaking new things in its spiritual factory. Like everythin



22


the mediæval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads,was as anonymous as it was enormous. It is admied thate conscious and active emancipators everywhere were therish priests and the religious brotherhoods; but no name

mong them has survived and no man of them has reapeds reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and innumer-le Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame,orked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages ofurope; and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was prob-ly the widest work ever done which was voluntary on both

des; and the Middle Ages was in this and other things thee of volunteers. It is possible enough to state roughly theages through which the thing passed; but such a statementes not explain the loosening of the grip of the great slave-

wners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically.he Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element,was a climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow.

have already suggested, touching that transformation of theoman Empire which was the background of all these cen-ries, how a mystical view of man’s dignity must have this

ect. A table that walked and talked, or a stool that ew withngs out of window, would be about as workable a thingan immortal chael. But though here as everywhere the

irit explains the processes, and the processes cannot evenausibly explain the spirit, these processes involve two veryactical points, without which we cannot understand howis great popular civilization was created — or how it wasstroyed.

What we call the manors were originally the villae of thegan lords, each with its population of slaves. Under thisocess, however it be explained, what had occurred was theminishment of the lords’ claim to the whole prot of a slavetate, by which it became a claim to the prot of part of it,d dwindled at last to certain dues or customary paymentsthe lord, having paid which the slave could enjoy not only

e use of the land but the prot of it. It must be rememberedat over a great part, and especially very important parts, ofe whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates electeda mystical communism and themselves oen of peasant

rth. Men not only obtained a fair amount of justice undereir care, but a fair amount of freedom even from their care-ssness. But two details of the development are very vital.rst, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long in thetermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the landas entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitledthe support of the land. He could not be evicted; he couldt even, in the modern fashion, have his rent raised. At theginning it was merely that the slave was owned, but at least

could not be disowned. At the end he had really become amall landlord, merely because it was not the lord that ownedm, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that in this (bye of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the veryity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasantherited something of the stability of the slave. He did notme to life in a competitive scramble where everybody was

ying to snatch his freedom from him. He found himselfmong neighbours who already regarded his presence as nor-al and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among whom-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition.

y a trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale,is prisoner had become the governor of his own prison. For

a lile time it was almost true that an Englishman’s house washis castle, because it had been built strong enough to be hisdungeon.

The other notable element was this: that when the produceof the land began by custom to be cut up and only partiallytransmied to the lord, the remainder was generally sub-divided into two types of property. One the serfs enjoyedseverally, in private patches, while the other they enjoyedin common, and generally in common with the lord. Thusarose the momentously important mediæval institutions of

the Common Land, owned side by side with private land. Itwas an alternative and a refuge. The mediævals, except whenthey were monks, were none of them Communists; but theywere all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of thedark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period thatour romances constantly describe a broken man as falling

back on the forests and the outlaw’s den, but never describehim as falling back on the common land, which was a muchmore common incident. Mediævalism believed in mending its

broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life formonks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It wastheir great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. ACommon was not a naked and negative thing like the scrubor heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. Itwas a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it wasdeliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance atthe bank. Now these provisions for a healthier distribution ofproperty would by themselves show any man of imaginationthat a real moral eort had been made towards social justice;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,without any groping for the light, had somehow broughtabout the peasant condition in place of the agrarian slaveestate, he has only to turn to what was happening in all the

other callings and aairs of humanity. Then he will cease todoubt. For he will nd the same mediæval men busy upon asocial scheme which points as plainly in eect to pity and acraving for equality. And it is a system which could no more

be produced by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an earthquake.

Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture wasguarded by the egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hardto nd any term to measure the distance between this systemand modern society; one can only approach it rst by the fainttraces it has le. Our daily life is liered with a debris of theMiddle Ages, especially of dead words which no longer carrytheir meaning. I have already suggested one example. We

hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian Commu-nism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truthdescends to such tries as the titles which we write on leersand postcards. The puzzling and truncated monosyllable“Esq.” is a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from chivalry tosnobbery. No two historic things could well be more dierentthan an esquire and a squire. The rst was above all things anincomplete and probationary position — the tadpole of knight-hood; 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 theirestates till they had given up any particular fancy for winning

their spurs. Esquire does not mean squire, and esq. does not



23

the meanIng of merry e ngLand

mean anything. But it remains on our leers a lile wriggle inpen and ink and an indecipherable hieroglyph twisted by thestrange turns of our history, which have turned a military dis-cipline into a pacic oligarchy, and that into a mere plutocracyat last. And there are similar historic riddles to be unpickedin the similar forms of social address. There is somethingsingularly forlorn about the modern word “Mister.” Even insound it has a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivel-ling of the strong word from which it came. Nor, indeed, isthe symbol of the mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing

a German story of Samson in which he bore the unassum-ing name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very muchshorn. There is something of the same dismal diminuendo inthe evolution of a Master into a Mister.

The very vital importance of the word “Master” is this. AGuild was, very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in whichevery man was his own employer. That is, a man could notwork at any trade unless he would join the league and acceptthe laws of that trade; but he worked in his own shop withhis own tools, and the whole prot went to himself. But theword “employer” marks a modern deciency which makesthe modern use of the word “master” quite inexact. A mastermeant something quite other and greater than a “boss.” Itmeant a master of the work, where it now means only a mas-ter of the workmen. It is an elementary character of Capital-ism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship,or a landowner have even seen the landscape, that the ownerof a goldmine may be interested in nothing but old pewter, orthe owner of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He may

be a more successful capitalist if he has a hobby of his own business; he is oen a more successful capitalist if he has thesense to leave it to a manager; but economically he can controlthe business because he is a capitalist, not because he has anykind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest grade in theGuild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the

business. To take the term created by the colleges in the sameepoch, all the mediæval bosses were Masters of Arts. Theother grades were the journeyman and the apprentice; butlike the corresponding degrees at the universities, they weregrades through which every common man could pass. Theywere not social classes; they were degrees and not castes. Thisis the whole point of the recurrent romance about the appren-tice marrying his master ’s daughter. The master would not besurprised at such a thing, any more than an M.A. would swellwith aristocratic indignation when his daughter married aB.A.

When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy tothe strictly egalitarian ideal, we nd again that the remains

of the thing to-day are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are City Companies which inherit the coatsof arms and the immense relative wealth of the old Guilds,and inherit nothing else. Even what is good about them isnot what was good about the Guilds. In one case we shallnd something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, inwhich, it is unnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayeror anybody who has ever known a bricklayer, but in whichthe senior partners of a few big businesses in the City, with afew faded military men with a taste in cookery, tell each otherin aer-dinner speeches that it has been the glory of their livesto make allegorical bricks without straw. In another case we

shall nd a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who do

deserve their name, in the sense that many of them empla large number of other people to whitewash. These Comnies support large charities and oen doubtless very valucharities; but their object is quite dierent from that of thcharities of the Guilds. The aim of the Guild charities wasame as the aim of the Common Land. It was to resist ineity — or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last generawould probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensurnot only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, buthat every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It soug

to rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any fadwhitewasher a new white coat. It was the whole aim of thGuilds to cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the weakest lingo aer the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row oshops unbroken like a line of bale. It resisted the growtha big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whwashers of the Whitewashers Company will not pretendit exists to prevent a small shop being swallowed by a bigshop, or that it has done anything whatever to prevent itthe best the kindness it would show to a bankrupt whiteer would be a kind of compensation; it would not be reinment; it would not be the restoration of status in an indu

system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of the life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy thtype itself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the sobject of equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon tsame level system of payment and treatment which is a pof complaint against the modern Trades Unions. But theysisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, upon a high dard of crasmanship, which still astonishes the world incorners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken gThere is no artist or art critic who will not concede, howedistant his own style from the Gothic school, that there wthis time a nameless but universal artistic touch in the ming of the very tools of life. Accident has preserved the ru

sticks and stools and pots and pans which have suggestishapes as if they were possessed not by devils but by elvFor they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent sysproduced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.

That the most mediæval of modern institutions, the TradUnions, do not ght for the same ideal of æsthetic nish true and certainly tragic; but to make it a maer of blamewholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The Trades Unionsconfederations of men without property, seeking to balanits absence by numbers and the necessary character of thlabour. The Guilds were confederations of men with propseeking to ensure each man in the possession of that prop

This is, of course, the only condition of aairs in which perty can properly be said to exist at all. We should not spof a negro community in which most men were white, burare negroes were giants. We should not conceive a marrcommunity in which most men were bachelors, and thremen had harems. A married community means a commuwhere most people are married; not a community whereor two people are very much married. A propertied commty means a community where most people have propertya community where there are a few capitalists. But in facGuildsmen (as also, for that maer, the serfs, semi-serfs apeasants) were much richer than can be realized even frothe fact that the Guilds protected the possession of house



24


ols, and just payment. The surplus is self-evident upon anyst study of the prices of the period, when all deductionsve been made, of course, for the dierent value of the actualinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of ale fore or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the maer isno way aected by the name of those coins. Even where thedividual wealth was severely limited, the collective wealthas very large — the wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, andpecially of the monastic estates. It is important to rememberis fact in the subsequent history of England.

he next fact to note is that the local government grew out ofings like the Guild system, and not the system from the gov-nment. In sketching the sound principles of this lost society,hall not, of course, be supposed by any sane person to bescribing a moral paradise, or to be implying that it was free

om the faults and ghts and sorrows that harass human lifeall times, and certainly not least in our own time. There wasair amount of rioting and ghting in connection with the

uilds; and there was especially for some time a combativevalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things andose of crasmen who made them, a conict in which theasmen on the whole prevailed. But whichever party mayve been predominant, it was the heads of the Guild whocame the heads of the town, and not vice versâ. The stirvivals of this once very spontaneous uprising can again been in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayord the Livery of the City of London. We are told so mo-tonously that the government of our fathers reposed uponms, that it is valid to insist that this, their most intimate anderyday sort of government, was wholly based upon tools; avernment in which the workman’s tool became the scep-

e. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests that ine Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from thelt of the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. Butmething very like this did happen in the interlude of this

ediæval democracy, fermenting under the crust of mediævalonarchy and aristocracy; where productive implementsen took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds oen exhib-

d emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaices, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorialbards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy’srderoys or a coster ’s pearl buons.

wo more points must be briey added; and the rough sketchthis now foreign and even fantastic state will be as com-ete as it can be made here. Both refer to the links betweenis popular life and the politics which are conventially thehole of history. The rst, and for that age the most evident,the Charter. To recur once more to the parallel of Trades

nions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, theharter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that “recogni-on” for which the railwaymen and other trades unionistsked some years ago, without success. By this they had thethority of the King, the central or national government; andis was of great moral weight with mediævals, who alwaysnceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative es-pe: they had none of the modern romanticism which makeserty akin to loneliness. Their view remains in the phraseout giving a man the freedom of a city: they had no desiregive him the freedom of a wilderness. To say that they had

so the authority of the Church is something of an under-

atement; for religion ran like a rich thread through the rude

tapestry of these popular things while they were still merelypopular; and many a trade society must have had a patronsaint long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that itwas from these municipal groups already in existence that therst men were chosen for the largest and perhaps the last ofthe great mediæval experiments: the Parliament.

We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort andEdward I., when they rst summoned Commons to council,chiey as advisers on local taxation, called “two burgesses”from every town. If we had read a lile more closely, those

simple words would have given away the whole secret of thelost mediæval civilization. We had only to ask what burgesseswere, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediate-ly have discovered that England was full of lile parliaments,out of which the great parliament was made. And if it be amaer of wonder that the great council (still called in quaintarchaism by its old title of the House of Commons) is the onlyone of these popular or elective corporations of which we hearmuch in our books of history, the explanation, I fear, is simpleand a lile sad. It is that the Parliament was the one amongthese mediæval creations which ultimately consented to be-tray and to destroy the rest.



25

natIonaLIty and the french wars

IX

Nationality and the French Wars

If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say thatChristendom was and is one culture, or one civilization, thereis a rough but plain way of puing it. It is by asking what is

the most common, or rather the most commonplace, of all theuses of the word “Christian.” There is, of course, the highestuse of all; but it has nowadays many other uses. Sometimes aChristian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more recent-ly, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian meansa modest person who believes that he bears a resemblanceto Christ. But it has long had one meaning in casual speechamong common people, and it means a culture or a civiliza-tion. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not actually say to JimHawkins, “I feel myself out of touch with a certain type ofcivilization”; but he did say, “I haven’t tasted Christian food.”The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hairand trousers do not indeed say, “We perceive a divergence

between her culture and our own”; but they do say, “Whycan’t she dress like a Christian?” That the sentiment has thussoaked down to the simplest and even stupidest daily talk is

but one evidence that Christendom was a very real thing. Butit was also, as we have seen, a very localized thing, especiallyin the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism the Chris-tian faith and aections encouraged led at last to an excessiveand exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of thesame saint, and a sort of duel between two statues of the samedivinity. By a process it is now our dicult duty to follow, areal estrangement between European peoples began. Men be-gan to feel that foreigners did not eat or drink like Christians,

and even, when the philosophic schism came, to doubt if theywere Christians.

There was, indeed, much more than this involved. Whilethe internal structure of mediævalism was thus parochialand largely popular, in the greater aairs, and especially theexternal aairs, such as peace and war, most (though by nomeans all) of what was mediæval was monarchical. To seewhat the kings came to mean we must glance back at the great

background, as of darkness and daybreak, against which therst gures of our history have already appeared. That back-ground was the war with the barbarians. While it lasted Chris-tendom was not only one nation but more like one city — anda besieged city. Wessex was but one wall or Paris one tower of

it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have chronicledthe siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. Whatfollowed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of theDark Ages and the dawn of mediævalism is full of the evan-gelizing of barbarism. And it is the paradox of the Crusadesthat though the Saracen was supercially more civilized thanthe Christian, it was a sound instinct which saw him also to bein spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of northern heathenrythe civilization spread with a simplier progress. But it was nottill the end of the Middle Ages, and close on the Reformation,that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyond Ger-many, were baptized at all. A ippant person, if he permiedhimself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be

inclined to suggest that for some reason it didn’t “take” ethen.

The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, aneven in the case of Islam the alien power which could nocrushed was evidently curbed. The Crusades became hopless, but they also became needless. As these fears faded princes of Europe, who had come together to face them, wle facing each other. They had more leisure to nd that own captaincies clashed; but this would easily have beenoverruled, or would have produced a pey riot, had not

true creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in thelocal life, tended to real variety. Royalties found they werrepresentatives almost without knowing it; and many a kinsisting on a genealogical tree or a title-deed found he sfor the forests and the songs of a whole country-side. In Eland especially the transition is typied in the accident wraised to the throne one of the noblest men of the MiddleAges.

Edward I. came clad in all the splendours of his epoch. Hhad taken the Cross and fought the Saracens; he had beeonly worthy foe of Simon de Montfort in those baronial wwhich, as we have seen, were the rst sign (however fain

a serious theory that England should be ruled by its barorather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de Montfand more solidly, to develop the great mediæval institutiof a parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed oexisting parish democracies, and was rst merely the summoning of local representatives to advise on local taxatioIndeed its rise was one with the rise of what we now calltion; and there is thus a thread of theory leading to its laclaims to have the sole right of taxing. But in the beginniwas an instrument of the most equitable kings, and notabinstrument of Edward I. He oen quarrelled with his parments and may sometimes have displeased his people (whas never been at all the same thing), but on the whole he

was supremely the representative sovereign. In this conntion one curious and dicult question may be considerehere, though it marks the end of a story that began with tNorman Conquest. It is prey certain that he was never mtruly a representative king, one might say a republican kthan in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem ismuch misunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupidspite against a gied and historic race as such, that we mpause for a paragraph upon it.

The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they wunpopular. They were the capitalists of the age, the men wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable that in thi

they were useful; it is certain that in this way they were uIt is also quite fair to say that in this way they were ill-usThe ill-usage was not indeed that suggested at random inromances, which mostly revolve on the one idea that theteeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story abKing John generally do not know the rather important fathat it was a story against King John. It is probably doubful; it was only insisted on as exceptional; and it was, by very insistence, obviously regarded as disreputable. But real unfairness of the Jews’ position was deeper and mordistressing to a sensitive and highly civilized people. Themight reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, aneven Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian pu

poses (such as the Crusades and the cathedrals) the mone



26


at could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usuryey inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and then, whenorse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor,hom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real caser the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed.nfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, withleast equal reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that mu-al charge of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It isrtain that in popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was notcused as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity.

haucer puts his curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth ofe so-hearted prioress, who wept when she saw a mouse inrap; and it was when Edward, breaking the rule by whiche rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers’ wealth, unge alien nanciers out of the land, that his people probablyw him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tenderther of his people.

Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Ed-ard was far from false. He was the most just and conscien-ous type of mediæval monarch; and it is exactly this fact thatings into relief the new force which was to cross his pathd in strife with which he died. While he was just, he was

so eminently legal. And it must be remembered, if we wouldt merely read back ourselves into the past, that much of thespute of the time was legal; the adjustment of dynastic andudal dierences not yet felt to be anything else. In this spiritdward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to theoish crown; and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated

uite honestly. But his legal, or, as some would say, pedanticind made the proviso that the Scoish king as such wasready under his suzerainty, and he probably never under-ood the spirit he called up against him; for that spirit had ast no name. We call it to-day Nationalism. Scotland resisted;d the adventures of an outlawed knight named Wallaceon furnished it with one of those legends which are more

mportant than history. In a way that was then at least equallyactical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especiallye patriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remaineden throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated andecuted; but the heather was already on re; and the espous-of the new national cause by one of Edward’s own knightsmed Bruce, seemed to the old king a mere betrayal of feu-l equity. He died in a nal fury at the head of a new inva -

on upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words theeat king commanded that his bones should be borne in frontthe bale; and the bones, which were of gigantic size, wereentually buried with the epitaph, “Here lies Edward thell, who was the hammer of the Scots.” It was a true epitaph,

ut in a sense exactly opposite to its intention. He was theirmmer, but he did not break but make them; for he smoteem on an anvil and he forged them into a sword.

hat coincidence or course of events, which must oen be re-arked in this story, by which (for whatever reason) our mostwerful kings did not somehow leave their power secure,owed itself in the next reign, when the baronial quarrelsere resumed and the northern kingdom, under Bruce, cutelf nally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise theign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding oneat we nd the new national tendency yet further developed.

he great French wars, in which England won so much glory,

ere opened by Edward III., and grew more and more nation-

alist. But even to feel the transition of the time we must rstrealize that the third Edward made as strictly legal and dynas-tic a claim to France as the rst Edward had made to Scotland;the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equallyconventional in form. He thought, or said, he had a claim on akingdom as a squire might say he had a claim on an estate; su-percially it was an aair for the English and French lawyers.To read into this that the people were sheep bought and soldis to misunderstand all mediæval history; sheep have no tradeunion. The English arms owed much of their force to the class

of the free yeomen; and the success of the infantry, especiallyof the archery, largely stood for that popular element whichhad already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Courtrai.But the point is this; that while the lawyers were talking aboutthe Salic Law, the soldiers, who would once have been talk-ing about guild law or glebe law, were already talking aboutEnglish law and French law. The French were rst in thistendency to see something outside the township, the trade

brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. Thewhole history of the change can be seen in the fact that theFrench had early begun to call the nation the Greater Land.France was the rst of nations and has remained the normof nations, the only one which is a nation and nothing else.

But in the collision the English grew equally corporate; and atrue patriotic applause probably hailed the victories of Crecyand Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory of Agin-court. The laer did not indeed occur until aer an intervalof internal revolutions in England, which will be consideredon a later page; but as regards the growth of nationalism, theFrench wars were continuous. And the English tradition thatfollowed aer Agincourt was continuous also. It is embodiedin rude and spirited ballads before the great Elizabethans. TheHenry V. of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry V. of history;yet he is more historic. He is not only a saner and more genial

but a more important person. For the tradition of the wholeadventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who

turned Henry into Harry. There were a thousand Harries inthe army at Agincourt, and not one. For the gure that Shake-speare framed out of the legends of the great victory is largelythe gure that all men saw as the Englishman of the MiddleAges. He did not really talk in poetry, like Shakespeare’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 notonly expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was notonly in bale that they drew the long bow. That ne farcicalimagery, which has descended to the comic songs and com-mon speech of the English poor even to-day, had its happyinfancy when England thus became a nation; though themodern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, havepartly lost the gaiety and kept only the humour. But in thatearly April of patriotism the new unity of the State still satlightly upon them; and a cobbler in Henry’s army, who wouldat home have thought rst that it was the day of St. Crispinof the Cobblers, might truly as well as sincerely have hailedthe splintering of the French lances in a storm of arrows, andcried, “St. George for Merry England.”

Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it wasthe April of patriotism it was the Autumn of mediæval societyIn the next chapter I shall try to trace the forces that weredisintegrating the civilization; and even here, aer the rst



27

natIonaLIty and the french wars

victories, it is necessary to insist on the bierness and barrenambition that showed itself more and more in the later stages,as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the timefar less happy than England — wasted by the treason of itsnobles and the weakness of its kings almost as much as by theinvasion of the islanders. And yet it was this very despair andhumiliation that seemed at last to rend the sky, and let in thelight of what it is hard for the coldest historian to call any-thing but a miracle.

It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Na-

tionalism eternal. It may be conjectured, though the questionis too dicult to be developed here, that there was somethingin the great moral change which turned the Roman Empireinto Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it aer-wards gave birth, was baptized into a promise, or at least intoa hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, asit were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of thiskind can be seen in the conception which turned marriagefrom a contract into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it iscertain that even for the most secular types of our own timetheir relation to their native land has become not contractual

but sacramental. We may say that ags are rags, that frontiersare ctions, but the very men who have said it for half theirlives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a ctioneven as I write. When the bale-trumpet blew in 1914 mod-ern humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before itknew what it had done. If the same sound is heard a thousandyears hence, there is no sign in the world to suggest to any ra-tional man that humanity will not do exactly the same thing.But even if this great and strange development be not endur-ing, the point is that it is felt as enduring. It is hard to give adenition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it if we callit the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to beunlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency askedof a patriot is the maximum that is asked by the most miracu-

lous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism isnot mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism isfor beer for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and inhealth, in national growth and glory and in national disgraceand decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a passen-ger, but if need be to go down with the ship.

It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquakeepisode in which a clearance in the earth and sky, above theconfusion and abasement of the crowns, showed the com-manding gure of a woman of the people. She was, in herown living loneliness, a French Revolution. She was the proofthat a certain power was not in the French kings or in theFrench knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw

something above her that was other than the sky, the fact thatshe lived the life of a saint and died the death of a martyr,probably stamped the new national sentiment with a sacredseal. And the fact that she fought for a defeated country,and, even though it was victorious, was herself ultimatelydefeated, denes that darker element of devotion of which Ispoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent withpatriotism. It is more appropriate in this place to consider theultimate reaction of this sacrice upon the romance and therealities of England.

I have never counted it a patriotic part to plaster my owncountry with conventional and unconvincing compliments;

but no one can understand England who does not understand

that such an episode as this, in which she was so clearly iwrong, has yet been ultimately linked up with a curious ity in which she is rather unusually in the right. No one cdidly comparing us with other countries can say we havecially failed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stor even the prophets who stoned us. The English historictradition has at least a loose large-mindedness which alwnally falls into the praise not only of great foreigners bugreat foes. Oen along with much injustice it has an illoggenerosity; and while it will dismiss a great people with

ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty hero-wship. There are more examples than one even in this chapfor our books may well make out Wallace a beer man thwas, as they aerwards assigned to Washington an even ter cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porpicture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambrpocket-handkerchief; but her aitude was more English anot less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything, nethe truth than Thackeray’s own notion of a mediævalismhypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who gures as a tycould weep with compassion; and it is probable enough Wallace wept, with or without a pocket-handkerchief. Mover, her romance was a reality, the reality of nationalism

she knew much more about the Scoish patriots ages befher time than Thackeray did about the Irish patriots immately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but in tmaer he was a very small man, and indeed an invisible The cases of Wallace and Washington and many others ahere only mentioned, however, to suggest an eccentric mnimity which surely balances some of our prejudices. Wedone many foolish things, but we have at least done one thing; we have whitewashed our worst enemies. If we hadone this for a bold Scoish raider and a vigorous Virginslave-holder, it may at least show that we are not likely tin our nal appreciation of the one white gure in the moprocessions of war. I believe there to be in modern Engla

something like a universal enthusiasm on this subject. Whave seen a great English critic write a book about this hine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely in order

blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do n believe there lives an Englishman now, who if he had theof being an Englishman then, would not discard his chanriding as the crowned conqueror at the head of all the spof Agincourt, if he could be that English common soldierwhom tradition tells that he broke his spear asunder to binto a cross for Joan of Arc.



28


X

The War of the Usurpers

he poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Demo-ats, Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in whichen Toryism was Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never

pressed his political point more clearly than in Pope’s linehich ran: “The right divine of kings to govern wrong.”will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I dot palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer andme of the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professede impossible ideal of “non-resistance” to any national andgitimate power; though I cannot see that even that wasservile and superstitious as the more modern ideal ofon-resistance” even to a foreign and lawless power. Bute seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads;d the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots wereder, equally religious but much more realistic; and thoughngled with many other and even opposite things of the

iddle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now tonsider. The connection can hardly be stated beer than byking Pope’s easy epigram and pointing out that it is, aer, very weak in philosophy. “The right divine of kings tovern wrong,” considered as a sneer, really evades all that

e mean by “a right.” To have a right to do a thing is not at alle same as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satiricallyout a divine right is what we all say quite seriously about a

uman right. If a man has a right to vote, has he not a right tote wrong? If a man has a right to choose his wife, has he notight to choose wrong? I have a right to express the opinion

hich I am now seing down; but I should hesitate to make

e controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right.ow mediæval monarchy, though only one aspect ofediæval rule, was roughly represented in the idea that theler had a right to rule as a voter has a right to vote. Height govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly andtravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as aivate man retains his right to marriage and locomotion

nless he goes horribly and extravagantly o his head. It wast really even so simple as this; for the Middle Ages weret, as it is oen the fashion to fancy, under a single and steelyscipline. They were very controversial and therefore verymplex; and it is easy, by isolating items whether about jusvinum or primus inter pares , to maintain that the mediævals

ere almost anything; it has been seriously maintained thatey were all Germans. But it is true that the inuence ofe Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen,couraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government,hich was meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore

en made the man tyrannical. The disadvantage of such des-tism is obvious enough. The precise nature of its advantage

ust be beer understood than it is, not for its own sake souch as for the story we have now to tell.

he advantage of “divine right,” or irremovable legitimacy,this; that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. “Roi neis”; the royal power, whether it was or was not the power

heaven, was in one respect like the power of heaven. It was

not for sale. Constitutional moralists have oen implied thata tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps beenless noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically havethe same virtues. And one virtue which they very markedlyshare is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do notcare a buon what they do to wealthy people. It is true thattyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavensalmost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming fromthe sky; a man no more expected to be the king than to be thewest wind or the morning star. But at least no wicked miller

can chain the wind to turn only his own mill; no pedanticscholar can trim the morning star to be his own reading-lamp.Yet something very like this is what really happened to Eng-land in the later Middle Ages; and the rst sign of it, I fancy,was the fall of Richard II.

Shakespeare’s historical plays are something truer than his-torical; they are traditional; the living memory of many thingslingered, though the memory of others was lost. He is rightin making Richard II. incarnate the claim to divine right; andBolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately brokeup the old mediæval order. But divine right had becomeat once drier and more fantastic by the time of the Tudors.Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part ofthe thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of stieningwhich is the main thing to be studied in later mediævalism.Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperatingprince; it might well be the weak link that snapped in thestrong chain of the Plantagenets. There may have been a realcase against the coup d’état which he eected in 1397, and hiskinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sectionsof disappointed opinion on his side when he eected in 1399the rst true usurpation in English history. But if we wish tounderstand that larger tradition which even Shakespeare hadlost, we must glance back at something which befell Richardeven in the rst years of his reign. It was certainly the greatest

event of his reign; and it was possibly the greatest event of allthe reigns which are rapidly considered in this book. The realEnglish people, the men who work with their hands, liedtheir hands to strike their masters, probably for the rst andcertainly for the last time in history.

Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decay-ing as by developing into something beer. In one sense itdid not die, but rather came to life. The slave-owner was likea man who should set up a row of sticks for a fence, and thennd they had struck root and were budding into small trees.They would be at once more valuable and less manageable,especially less portable; and such a dierence between a stickand a tree was precisely the dierence between a slave and a

serf — or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rap-idly tending to become. It was, in the best sense of a baeredphrase, a social evolution, and it had the great evil of one.The evil was that while it was essentially orderly, it was stillliterally lawless. That is, the emancipation of the commonshad already advanced very far, but it had not yet advancedfar enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was “unwrit-ten,” like the British Constitution, and (like that evolution-ary, not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden bythe rich, who now drive their great coaches through Acts ofParliament. The new peasant was still legally a slave, and wasto learn it by one of those turns of fortune which confound

a foolish faith in the common sense of unwrien constitu-



29

the war of the usurPers

tions. The French Wars gradually grew to be almost as muchof a scourge to England as they were to France. England wasdespoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increasedat the extremes of society; and, by a process more proper to anensuing chapter, the balance of the beer mediævalism waslost. Finally, a furious plague, called the Black Death, burstlike a blast on the land, thinning the population and throw-ing the work of the world into ruin. There was a shortage oflabour; a diculty of geing luxuries; and the great lords didwhat one would expect them to do. They became lawyers, and

upholders of the leer of the law. They appealed to a rule al-ready nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more directservitude of the Dark Ages. They announced their decision tothe people, and the people rose in arms.

The two dramatic stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubt-fully with the beginning, and denitely with the end of therevolt, are far from unimportant, despite the desire of ourpresent prosaic historians to pretend that all dramatic storiesare unimportant. The tale of Tyler’s rst blow is signicant inthe sense that it is not only dramatic but domestic. It avengedan insult to the family, and made the legend of the whole riot,whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstrationon behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of thepoor is almost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspec-tor need only bring a printed form and a few long words to dothe same thing without having his head broken. The occasionof the protest, and the form which the feudal reaction hadrst taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but a part of a generalprocess of pressing the population to servile labour, whichfully explains the ferocious language held by the governmentaer the rising had failed; the language in which it threat-ened to make the state of the serf more servile than before.The facts aending the failure in question are less in dispute.The mediæval populace showed considerable military en-ergy and co-operation, stormed its way to London, and was

met outside the city by a company containing the King andthe Lord Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. Thetreacherous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the signalfor bale and massacre on the spot. The peasants closed inroaring, “They have killed our leader”; when a strange thinghappened; something which gives us a eeting and a nalglimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages.For one wild moment divine right was divine.

The King was no more than a boy; his very voice must haverung out to that multitude almost like the voice of a child.But the power of his fathers and the great Christendom fromwhich he came fell in some strange fashion upon him; andriding out alone before the people, he cried out, “I am your

leader”; and himself promised to grant them all they asked.That promise was aerwards broken; but those who see inthe breach of it the mere ckleness of the young and frivolousking, are not only shallow but uerly ignorant interpreters ofthe whole trend of that time. The point that must be seized,if subsequent things are to be seen as they are, is that Parlia-ment certainly encouraged, and Parliament almost certainlyobliged, the King to repudiate the people. For when, aerthe rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were betrayed,the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament,the Parliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is notmerely a governing body but a governing class. Parliament

was as contemptuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as

of the Chartists in the nineteenth century. This council, summoned by the king like juries and many other thingsget from plain men rather reluctant evidence about taxathas already become an object of ambition, and is, therefoan aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally tknife, between the Commons with a large C and the comwith a small one. Talking about the knife, it is notable thamurderer of Tyler was not a mere noble but an elective mistrate of the mercantile oligarchy of London; though theis probably no truth in the tale that his blood-stained dag

ger gures on the arms of the City of London. The mediæLondoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, buof sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of theof their Redeemer, in the place which is really occupied bsword of St. Paul.

It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristoc being an object of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more sthan this; but if ever men yearn to serve on juries we mayprobably guess that juries are no longer popular. Anyhowthis must be kept in mind, as against the opposite idea of jus divinum or xed authority, if we would appreciate theof Richard. If the thing which dethroned him was a rebelit was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that had proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion opeople. But this is not the main point. The point is that bythe removal of Richard, a step above the parliament becapossible for the rst time. The transition was tremendousthe crown became an object of ambition. That which onecould snatch another could snatch from him; that which House of Lancaster held merely by force the House of Yocould take from it by force. The spell of an undethronablthing seated out of reach was broken, and for three unhagenerations adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairwslippery with blood, above which was something new inmediæval imagination; an empty throne.

It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurplargely because he was a usurper, is the clue to many thinsome of which we should now call good, some bad, all owhich we should probably call good or bad with the excefacility with which we dismiss distant things. It led the Lcastrian House to lean on Parliament, which was the mixmaer we have already seen. It may have been in some wgood for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged byinstitution which at least kept something of the old freshand freedom of speech. It was almost certainly bad for thparliament, making it yet more the ally of the mere ambinoble, of which we shall see much later. It also led the Latrian House to lean on patriotism, which was perhaps mo

popular; to make English the tongue of the court for the time, and to reopen the French wars with the ne ag-waof Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rathperhaps, on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthaspect of clericalism. A certain morbidity which more anmore darkened the end of mediævalism showed itself in and more careful cruelties against the last crop of heresieA slight knowledge of the philosophy of these heresies wlend lile support to the notion that they were in themseprophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybocan call Wyclie a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Aa Protestant; and if John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer wa

a Reformer. But though the new heresies did not even hin



30


the beginning of English Protestantism, they did, perhaps,nt at the end of English Catholicism. Cobham did not light andle to be handed on to Nonconformist chapels; but Arun-l did light a torch, and put it to his own church. Such real

npopularity as did in time aach to the old religious system,d which aerwards became a true national tradition againstary, was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these

eenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy,d a defensible philosophy, but with some of these menrsecution was rather a perversion. Across the channel, one

them was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc.ut this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in alle epoch that follows the fall of Richard II., and especiallythose feuds that found so ironic an imagery in Englishses — and thorns. The foreshortening of such a backwardance as this book can alone claim to be, forbids any entranceto the military mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster, ory aempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and revengeshich lled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and thearlike widow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as ismetimes exaggeratively implied, ghting for nothing, oren (like the lion and the unicorn) merely ghting for theown. The shadow of a moral dierence can still be traceden in that stormy twilight of a heroic time. But when weve said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the new no-

on of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops,d York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of

king who permits nothing to come between him and hisople, we have said everything of permanent political inter-t that could be traced by counting all the bows of Barnetall the lances of Tewkesbury. But this truth, that there wasmething which can only vaguely be called Tory about therkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justiablemance to the last and most remarkable gure of the ghtingouse of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.

we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunsetthe Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not whollyled chivalry, there is no beer study than the riddle ofchard III. Of course, scarcely a line of him was like thericature with which his much meaner successor placardede world when he was dead. He was not even a hunchback;had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably

e eect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slenderd sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts usmehow as the crooked shadow of a straight knight of beerys. He was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood; some ofe men he executed deserved it as much as any men of thatcked time; and even the tale of his murdered nephews is

t certain, and is told by those who also tell us he was bornth tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimson

oud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted ise very air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say heas incapable even of the things of which he may have beennocent. Whether or no he was a good man, he was appar-tly a good king and even a popular one; yet we think of himguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on suerance. He antici-ted the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art andusic, and he seems to have held to the old paths of religiond charity. He did not pluck perpetually at his sword andgger because his only pleasure was in cuing throats; he

obably did it because he was nervous. It was the age of our

rst portrait-painting, and a ne contemporary portrait of himthrows a more plausible light on this particular detail. Forit shows him touching, and probably twisting, a ring on hisnger, the very act of a high-strung personality who wouldalso dget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, wecan study all that has made it worth while to pause so longupon his name; an atmosphere very dierent from everything

before and aer. The face has a remarkable intellectual beauty but there is something else on the face that is hardly in itselfeither good or evil, and that thing is death; the death of an

epoch, the death of a great civilization, the death of somethingwhich once sang to the sun in the canticle of St. Francis andsailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First Crusade,

but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards,wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambledfor the crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, andhas this one grace among its dying virtues, that its valour isthe last to die.

But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richardof Gloucester, there was a touch about him which makes himtruly the last of the mediæval kings. It is expressed in the oneword which he cried aloud as he struck down foe aer foe inthe last charge at Bosworth — treason. For him, as for the rstNorman kings, treason was the same as treachery; and in thiscase at least it was the same as treachery. When his noblesdeserted him before the bale, he did not regard it as a newpolitical combination, but as the sin of false friends and faith-less servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a heraldhe challenged his rival to a ght as personal as that of twopaladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was notlikely to reply. The modern world had begun. The call echoedunanswered down the ages; for since that day no English kinghas fought aer that fashion. Having slain many, he was him-self slain and his diminished force destroyed. So ended thewar of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the

usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight fromnowhere, found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.



31

the r eBeLLIon of the r Ich

XI

The Rebellion of the Rich

Sir Thomas More, apart from any arguments about themore mystical meshes in which he was ultimately caughtand killed, will be hailed by all as a hero of the New Learn-

ing; that great dawn of a more rational daylight which for somany made mediævalism seem a mere darkness. Whateverwe think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will beno dispute about his appreciation of the Renascence. He wasabove all things a Humanist and a very human one. He waseven in many ways very modern, which some rather errone-ously suppose to be the same as being human; he was alsohumane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal,or rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something ofthe ingenuity of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with muchmore than the ippancy aributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It isnot fair to charge the Utopian notions upon his morality; buttheir subjects and suggestions mark what (for want of a beer

word) we can only call his modernism. Thus the immortal-ity of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savoursof evolution; and the grosser jest about the preliminariesof marriage might be taken quite seriously by the studentsof Eugenics. He suggested a sort of pacism — though theUtopians had a quaint way of achieving it. In short, while hewas, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of mediæval abuses,few would now deny that Protestantism would be too nar-row rather than too broad for him. If he was obviously not aProtestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him thename of a Reformer. But he was an innovator in things morealluring to modern minds than theology; he was partly what

we should call a Neo-Pagan. His friend Colet summed up thatescape from mediævalism which might be called the passagefrom bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debatesthey are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growthof this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog-Latin. It would be nearer the truth to call the mediævals bi-lingual than to call their Latin a dead language. Greek never,of course, became so general a possession; but for the manwho got it, it is not too much to say that he felt as if he werein the open air for the rst time. Much of this Greek spiritwas reected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its bal-ance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probablethat he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which

inevitably infected the splendid intellectualism of the reac-tion against the Middle Ages; we can imagine him thinkinggargoyles Gothic, in the sense of barbaric, or even failing to bestirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” Thewealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit, loveliness, andcivic heroism, had so recently been revealed to that generationin its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seem atrie if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of theDark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with theeyes of More we are looking from the widest windows of thattime; looking over an English landscape seen for the rst timevery equally, in the level light of the sun at morning. For whathe saw was England of the Renascence; England passing from

the mediæval to the modern. Thus he looked forth, and smany things and said many things; they were all worthymany wiy; but he noted one thing which is at once a hofancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked ovthat landscape said: “Sheep are eating men.”

This singular summary of the great epoch of our emancition and enlightenment is not the fact usually put rst invery curt historical accounts of it. It has nothing to do withe translation of the Bible, or the character of Henry VIIIthe characters of Henry VIII.’s wives, or the triangular de

between Henry and Luther and the Pope. It was not Popsheep who were eating Protestant men, or vice versa; nor Henry, at any period of his own brief and rather bewildepapacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by this picturexpression, was that an intensive type of agriculture wasgiving way to a very extensive type of pasture. Great spaof England which had hitherto been cut up into the commwealth of a number of farmers were being laid under theereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has been put, btouch of epigram rather in the manner of More himself, b

J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think, only to be fouin the back les of The New Witness. He enunciated the padox that the very much admired individual, who made t

blades of grass grow instead of one, was a murderer. In tsame article, Mr. Stephen traced the true moral origins ofmovement, which led to the growing of so much grass anthe murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so much huity. He traced it, and every true record of that transformatraces it, to the growth of a new renement, in a sense a mrational renement, in the governing class. The mediævahad been, by comparison, a coarse fellow; he had merelyin the largest kind of farm-house aer the fashion of the est kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could, but hequite ready to drink ale; and science had not yet smoothe

paths with petrol. At a time later than this, one of the greladies of England writes to her husband that she cannot cto him because her carriage horses are pulling the ploughthe true Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rhampered, but in the time of Henry VIII. the transformatwas beginning. In the next generation a phrase was commwhich is one of the keys of the time, and is very much theto these more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that lord was said to be “Italianate.” It meant subtler shapes o

beauty, delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver not treaas barbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of moten metal, mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a loadof beauty; it meant the perfection of tries. It was not, as

popular Gothic crasmanship, the almost unconscious toof art upon all necessary things: rather it was the pouringthe whole soul of passionately conscious art especially inunnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul. must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is an exption — and an excuse.

The old barony had indeed been thinned by the civil wathat closed at Bosworth, and curtailed by the economicalcray policy of that unkingly king, Henry VII. He was hia “new man,” and we shall see the barons largely give plto a whole nobility of new men. But even the older familialready had their faces set in the newer direction. Some o

them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have gu



32


th as old and new families. In any case the spirit of thehole upper class can be described as increasingly new. Thenglish aristocracy, which is the chief creation of the Refor-ation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise, which isw almost universally regarded as very high praise. It was

ways progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proudtheir ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocratsve rather been proud of their descendants. For their descen-nts they planned huge foundations and piled mountainswealth; for their descendants they fought for a higher and

gher place in the government of the state; for their descen-nts, above all, they nourished every new science or schemesocial philosophy. They seized the vast economic chancespasturage; but they also drained the fens. They swept awaye priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. Ase new Tudor house passes through its generations a newd more rationalist civilization is being made; scholars areticizing authentic texts; sceptics are discrediting not onlypish saints but pagan philosophers; specialists are analyz-

g and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men.

We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England thereas a real revolution of the poor. It very nearly succeeded;d I need not conceal the conviction that it would have beene best possible thing for all of us if it had entirely succeeded.Richard II. had really sprung into the saddle of Wat Tyler,rather if his parliament had not unhorsed him when hed got there, if he had conrmed the fact of the new peasant

eedom by some form of royal authority, as it was alreadymmon to conrm the fact of the Trade Unions by the forma royal charter, our country would probably have had asppy a history as is possible to human nature. The Rena-ence, when it came, would have come as popular educationd not the culture of a club of æsthetics. The New Learningight have been as democratic as the old learning in the oldys of mediæval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of

e school of Cellini might have been but the highest gradethe cra of a guild. The Shakespearean drama might haveen acted by workmen on wooden stages set up in the street

ke Punch and Judy, the ner fullment of the miracle play aswas acted by a guild. The players need not have been “theng’s servants,” but their own masters. The great Renascenceight have been liberal with its liberal education. If this be ancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the mediævalvolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any oneshow that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The

udal parliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants atast into their dubious and half-developed status. More thanis it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of

e really decisive events aerwards. When Henry VIII. camethe throne the guilds were perhaps checked but apparently

nchanged, and even the peasants had probably regainedound; many were still theoretically serfs, but largely un-r the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediæval systemll stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to growain; but all such speculations are swamped in new andry strange things. The failure of the revolution of the pooras ultimately followed by a counter-revolution; a successfulvolution of the rich.

he apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political anden personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the

arriages of Henry VIII. and the aair of the monasteries. The

marriages of Henry VIII. have long been a popular and even astale joke; and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as thereis in almost any joke if it is suciently popular, and indeedif it is suciently stale. A jocular thing never lives to be staleunless it is also serious. Henry was popular in his rst days,and even foreign contemporaries give us quite a gloriouspicture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with allthe new accomplishments. In his last days he was somethingvery like a maniac; he no longer inspired love, and even whenhe inspired fear, it was rather the fear of a mad dog than of

a watch-dog. In this change doubtless the inconsistency andeven ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings played a great partAnd it is but just to him to say that, perhaps with the excep-tion of the rst and the last, he was almost as unlucky in hiswives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedlythe aair of the rst divorce that broke the back of his honour,and incidentally broke a very large number of other morevaluable and universal things. To feel the meaning of his furywe must realize that he did not regard himself as the enemy

but rather as the friend of the Pope; there is a shadow of theold story of Becket. He had defended the Pope in diplomacyand the Church in controversy; and when he wearied of hisqueen and took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne

Boleyn, he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, in thatage of cynical concessions, might very well be made to him

by a friend. But it is part of that high inconsistency which isthe fate of the Christian faith in human hands, that no manknows when the higher side of it will really be uppermost,if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of the Churchwill not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthyof the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought tolean upon the cushions of Leo and found he had struck hisarm upon the rock of Peter. The Pope denied the new mar-riage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness of anger, dissolvedall the old relations with the Papacy. It is probable that hedid not clearly know how much he was doing then; and it

is very tenable that we do not know it now. He certainly didnot think he was Anti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridiculoussense, we can hardly say that he thought he was anti-papal,since he apparently thought he was a pope. From this dayreally dates something that played a certain part in history,the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widelydierent from the mediæval one. It is a maer which furtherembarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catho-lic things in Anglicanism, for it was a new note and yet onestruck by the older party. The supremacy of the King over theEnglish national church was not, unfortunately, merely a fadof the King, but became partly, and for one period, a fad ofthe church. But apart from all controverted questions, there isat least a human and historic sense in which the continuity ofour past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not only cuto England from Europe, but what was even more important,he cuts o England from England.

The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty ministerwho had held the scales between the Empire and the FrenchMonarchy, and made the modern balance of power in Europe.He is oen described under the dictum of Ego et Rex Meus; buthe marks a stage in the English story rather because he suf-fered for it than because he said it. Ego et Rex Meus might bethe moo of any modern Prime Minister; for we have forgot-ten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant.



33

the r eBeLLIon of the r Ich

Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, sim-ply dismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the Eng-lish were amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarckwas turned away like a butler. A more awful act proved thenew force was already inhuman; it struck down the noblestof the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed sometimeslike an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saintunder Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the deathhas naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of hissoul; his tenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for

Humanism it must have seemed a monstrous sacrice; it wassomehow as if Montaigne were a martyr. And that is indeedthe note; something truly to be called unnatural had alreadyentered the naturalism of the Renascence; and the soul of thegreat Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun, saying “Ishall be above that fellow” with Franciscan familiarity, whichcan love nature because it will not worship her. So he le tohis king the sun, which for so many weary days and yearswas to go down only on his wrath.

But the more impersonal process which More himself hadobserved (as noted at the beginning of this chapter) is moreclearly dened, and less clouded with controversies, in thesecond of the two parts of Henry’s policy. There is indeed acontroversy about the monasteries; but it is one that is clarify-ing and seling every day. Now it is true that the Church, bythe Renascence period, had reached a considerable corrup-tion; but the real proofs of it are uerly dierent both fromthe contemporary despotic pretence and from the commonProtestant story. It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote theleers of bishops and such authorities denouncing the sinsof monastic life, violent as they oen are. They cannot pos-sibly be more violent than the leers of St. Paul to the purestand most primitive churches; the apostle was there writingto those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and hetalks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation,

for those concerned for such subtleties, may possibly be foundin the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men, butfor men. Such leers had been wrien in all centuries; andeven in the sixteenth century they do not prove so much thatthere were bad abbots as that there were good bishops. More-over, even those who profess that the monks were proigatesdare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth inCobbe’s point that where monks were landlords, they didnot become rack-renting landlords, and could not becomeabsentee landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness inthe good institutions as well as a mere strength in the badones; and that weakness partakes of the worst element of thetime. In the fall of good things there is almost always a touch

of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed moreeasily because they did not stand together. They did not standtogether because the spirit of the age (which is very oen theworst enemy of the age) was the increasing division betweenrich and poor; and it had partly divided even the rich andpoor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it nearly always comes,from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.

To take a modern aack on liberty, on a much lower plane, weare familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great

brewers, or even the great hotel proprietors, and pointing outthe uselessness of a lier of lile public-houses. That is whatthe Tudor politicians did rst 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 resistat any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of the relihouses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment alords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much grlords, for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentarrally to the cause of the rich did not wipe out the disgracof a thousand pey interferences which had told only to advantage of the poor; and they were soon to learn that ino epoch for their easy rule and their careless hospitalitygreat houses, now isolated, were themselves brought dow

one by one; and the beggar, whom the monastery had seras a sort of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and foundruin. For a new and wide philosophy was in the world, wstill rules our society. By this creed most of the mystical vtues of the old monks have simply been turned into greaand the greatest of these is charity.

But the populace which had risen under Richard II. was yet disarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of bow

bill, and organized into local groups of town and guild amanor. Over half the counties of England the people rosefought one nal bale for the vision of the Middle Ages. chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirty fellow named ThomCromwell, was specially singled out as the tyrant, and heindeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare.popular movement was put down partly by force; and ththe new note of modern militarism in the fact that it was down by cynical professional troops, actually brought inforeign countries, who destroyed English religion for hirBut, like the old popular rising, it was even more put dow

by fraud. Like the old rising, it was suciently triumphato force the government to a parley; and the governmentto resort to the simple expedient of calming the people wpromises, and then proceeding to break rst the promisethen the people, aer the fashion made familiar to us by modern politicians in their aitude towards the great stri

The revolt bore the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, andprogramme was practically the restoration of the old reliIn connection with the fancy about the fate of England ifhad triumphed, it proves, I think, one thing; that his triumwhile it might or might not have led to something that co

be called a reform, would have rendered quite impossibleverything that we now know as the Reformation.

The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell becan Inquisition of the blackest and most unbearable sort. Hrians, who have no shadow of sympathy with the old relare agreed that it was uprooted by means more horrible thave ever, perhaps, been employed in England before orIt was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous by

spies. The spoliation of the monasteries especially was caout, not only with a violence which recalled barbarism, bwith a minuteness for which there is no other word but mness. It was as if the Dane had returned in the character odetective. The inconsistency of the King’s personal aitudCatholicism did indeed complicate the conspiracy with n

brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction as therewas in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that tfavour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the mterribly for being simplied to the single vision of the wrof the King. It culminated in a strange act which rounds symbolically the story told on an earlier page. For the de

revenged himself on a rebel whose deance seemed to hi



34


ring down three centuries. He laid waste the most popularrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once

dden singing, because it was also the shrine where Kingenry had knelt to repent. For three centuries the Churchd the people had called Becket a saint, when Henry Tudorose and called him a traitor. This might well be thought thepmost point of autocracy; and yet it was not really so.

or then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation thatll stranger something of which we have, perhaps fanci-lly, found hints before in this history. The strong king was

eak. He was immeasurably weaker than the strong kingsthe Middle Ages; and whether or no his failure had beenreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the dykethe ancient doctrines let in a ood that may almost be saidhave washed him away. In a sense he disappeared beforedied; for the drama that lled his last days is no longer

e drama of his own character. We may put the maer mostactically by saying that it is unpractical to discuss whetheroude nds any justication for Henry’s crimes in the desirecreate a strong national monarchy. For whether or no it wassired, it was not created. Least of all our princes did the Tu-rs leave behind them a secure central government, and the

me when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or twonerations before the time when it was weakest. But a fewars aerwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crownd its new servants were to be reversed on a high stage so ashorrify the world; and the axe which had been sanctiedth the blood of More and soiled with the blood of Cromwell

as, at the signal of one of that slave’s own descendants, tol and to kill an English king.

he tide which thus burst through the breach and over-helmed the King as well as the Church was the revolt ofe rich, and especially of the new rich. They used the King’sme, and could not have prevailed without his power, bute ultimate eect was rather as if they had plundered the

ng aer he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly lilethe wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing,tually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, noubt, by the fact that Edward VI. succeeded to the throne as

mere boy, but the deeper truth can be seen in the dicultydrawing any real line between the two reigns. By marryingto the Seymour family, and thus providing himself with an, Henry had also provided the country with the very typepowerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. Anormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of theymours by his own brother, was enacted during the impo-nce of the childish king, and the successful Seymour guredLord Protector, though even he would have found it hard

say what he was protecting, since it was not even his ownmily. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every humaning was le unprotected from the greed of such cannibalotectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, buthat occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civi-ation. Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders, the mean-t of lucky men, looted the art and economics of the Middleges like thieves robbing a church. Their names (when theyd not change them) became the names of the great dukesd marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forthour history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruc-

on occurred when the armed men of the Seymours and their

rt passed from the sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking

of the Guilds. The mediæval Trade Unions were struck down,their buildings broken into by the soldiery, and their fundsseized by the new nobility. And this simple incident takes allits common meaning out of the assertion (in itself plausibleenough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time, wereprobably not at their best. Proportion is the only practicalthing; and it may be true that Cæsar was not feeling well onthe morning of the Ides of March. But simply to say that theGuilds declined, is about as true as saying that Cæsar quietlydecayed from purely natural causes at the foot of the statue of

Pompey.



35

sPaIn and the schIsm of natIons

XII

Spain and the Schism of Nations

The revolution that arose out of what is called the Rena-scence, and ended in some countries in what is called theReformation, did in the internal politics of England one

drastic and denite thing. That thing was destroying theinstitutions of the poor. It was not the only thing it did, but itwas much the most practical. It was the basis of all the prob-lems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much thetheological theories of the time had to do with it is a perfectlyfair maer for dierence of opinion. But neither party, ifeducated about the facts, will deny that the same time andtemper which produced the religious schism also producedthis new lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme Protestantwill probably be content to say that Protestantism was not themotive, but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will prob-ably 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 ofthe eighteenth century, when Protestantism was already pass-ing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be madeout for the paradox that Puritanism was rst and last a veneeron Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst fornew things in the noblesse of the Renascence and ended inthe Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was rst founded at theReformation was a new and abnormally powerful aristocracy,and what was destroyed, in an ever-increasing degree, waseverything that could be held, directly or indirectly, by thepeople in spite of such an aristocracy. This fact has lled allthe subsequent history of our country; but the next particular

point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. TheKing, in reality, had already been elbowed aside by the court-iers who had crowded behind him just before the bursting ofthe door. The King is le behind in the rush for wealth, andalready can do nothing alone. And of this fact the next reign,aer the chaos of Edward VI.’s, aords a very arresting proof.

Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Katherine, hasa bad name even in popular history; and popular prejudice isgenerally more worthy of study than scholarly sophistry. Herenemies were indeed largely wrong about her character, butthey were not wrong about her eect. She was, in the lim-ited 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. Itis true, when all is said, that she set herself to burn out “NoPopery” and managed to burn it in. The concentration of herfanaticism into cruelty, especially its concentration in par-ticular places and in a short time, did remain like somethingred-hot in the public memory. It was the rst of the series ofgreat historical accidents that separated a real, if not universal,public opinion from the old régime. It has been summarizedin the death by re of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; forone of them at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more ro-

bust and human type, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob and coward in the councils of HenryVIII. as to make Thomas Cromwell seem by comparison a

man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, thsaner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak laterthe time even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced lesand revulsion than the massacre in the ames of many mobscure enthusiasts, whose very ignorance and poverty mtheir cause seem more popular than it really was. But thiugly feature was brought into sharper relief, and producmore conscious or unconscious bierness, because of thaother great fact of which I spoke above, which is the deteing test of this time of transition.

What made all the dierence was this: that even in this Clic reign the property of the Catholic Church could not bestored. The very fact that Mary was a fanatic, and yet thisof justice was beyond the wildest dreams of fanaticism —is the point. The very fact that she was angry enough to cmit wrongs for the Church, and yet not bold enough to afor the rights of the Church — that is the test of the time. was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was allowed to deprive great men of their property — or ratheother people’s property. She could punish heresy, she counot punish sacrilege. She was forced into the false positioof killing men who had not gone to church, and sparing who had gone there to steal the church ornaments. Whatforced her into it? Not certainly her own religious aitudwhich was almost maniacally sincere; not public opinionwhich had naturally much more sympathy for the religiohumanities which she did not restore than for the religiohumanities which she did. The force came, of course, fronew nobility and the new wealth they refused to surrendand the success of this early pressure proves that the nobwas already stronger than the Crown. The sceptre had on

been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a treasuhouse, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blo

There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the storMary having “Calais” wrien on her heart, when the last

of the mediæval conquests reverted to France. Mary hadsolitary and heroic half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a pBut patriots are oen pathetically behind the times; for thvery fact that they dwell on old enemies oen blinds themnew ones. In a later generation Cromwell exhibited the serror reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spwhen he should have kept it on France. In our own time

Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought alrto have had it on Germany. With no particular anti-nationintention, Mary nevertheless got herself into an anti-natiposition towards the most tremendous international probof her people. It is the second of the coincidences that conrmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name of it w

Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spish prince, and probably saw no more in such an allianceher father had done. But by the time she was succeeded bsister Elizabeth, who was more cut o from the old religi(though very tenuously aached to the new one), and bytime the project of a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeherself had fallen through, something had matured whicwider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishstanding on his lile island as on a lonely boat, had alreafelt falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.

Wooden clichés about the birth of the British Empire andspacious days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscu

but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases one



36


ould fancy that England, in some imperial fashion, nowst realized that she was great. It would be far truer to sayat she now rst realized that she was small. The great poetthe spacious days does not praise her as spacious, butly as small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion

as wholly veiled until the eighteenth century; and evenhen it came it was far less vivid and vital than what camethe sixteenth. What came then was not Imperialism; it

as Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginningher modern history, that one thing human imagination

ll always nd heroic — the story of a small nationality. Theusiness of the Armada was to her what Bannockburn was toe Scots, or Majuba to the Boers — a victory that astonisheden the victors. What was opposed to them was Imperialismits complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since

ome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. Itas the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It isly when we realize that the English were, by comparison, asngy, as undeveloped, as pey and provincial as Boers, thate can appreciate the height of their deance or the splen-ur of their escape. We can only grasp it by grasping that for

great part of Europe the cause of the Armada had almoste cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The Pope had

clared Elizabeth illegitimate — logically, it is hard to seehat else he could say, having declared her mother’s marriagevalid; but the fact was another and perhaps a nal strokendering England from the elder world. Meanwhile thosecturesque English privateers who had plagued the Span-h Empire of the New World were spoken of in the Southmply as pirates, and technically the description was true;ly technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect

ghtly judged with some generous weakness. Then, as if toamp the contrast in an imperishable image, Spain, or rathere empire with Spain for its centre, put forth all its strength,d seemed to cover the sea with a navy like the legendaryvy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed island with the

eight and solemnity of a day of judgment; sailors or piratesuck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon,

ught it with mere masses of aming rubbish, and in that lastur of grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and sweptund the island, and the gigantic eet was seen no more. The

ncanny completeness and abrupt silence that swallowed thisodigy touched a nerve that has never ceased to vibrate. Thepe of England dates from that hopeless hour, for there is noal hope that has not once been a forlorn hope. The breakingthat vast naval net remained like a sign that the small thing

hich escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there isuly a sense in which we may never be so small or so greatain.

or the splendour of the Elizabethan age, which is alwaysoken of as a sunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whethere regard it as the end of the Renascence or the end of thed mediæval civilization, no candid critic can deny that itsief glories ended with it. Let the reader ask himself whatikes him specially in the Elizabethan magnicence, andwill generally nd it is something of which there were at

ast traces in mediæval times, and far fewer traces in modernmes. The Elizabethan drama is like one of its own trag-ies — its tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out bye Puritans. It is needless to say that the chief tragedy wase cuing short of the comedy; for the comedy that came to

England aer the Restoration was by comparison both foreignand frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being hu-morous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be notedthat the givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespear-ian love-stories nearly all belong to a world which was pass-ing, whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same with thechief Elizabethan ideals, oen embodied in the Elizabethandrama. The national devotion to the Virgin Queen must not

be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarse andcray character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics might

indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary bythe Virgin Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged atrue virgin for a false one. But this truth does not dispose of atrue, though limited, contemporary cult. Whatever we thinkof that particular Virgin Queen, the tragic heroines of the timeoer us a whole procession of virgin queens. And it is certainthat the mediævals would have understood much beer thanthe moderns the martyrdom of Measure for Measure. And aswith the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mysti-cal monarchy gloried in Richard II . was soon to be dethronedmuch more ruinously than in Richard II. The same Puritanswho tore o the pasteboard crowns of the stage players werealso to tear o the real crowns of the kings whose parts they

played. All mummery was to be forbidden, and all monarchyto be called mummery.

Shakespeare died upon St. George’s Day, and much of whatSt. George had meant died with him. I do not mean that thepatriotism of Shakespeare or of England died; that remainedand even rose steadily, to be the noblest pride of the comingtimes. But much more than patriotism had been involvedin that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart haddedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. Theconception of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Agesone very unique and as yet unreplaced idea. It was the ideaof variation without antagonism. The Seven Champions of

Christendom were multiplied by seventy times seven in thepatrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very ideathat 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 badg-es of St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might ght each otherin the streets; but they did not believe that St. Crispin and St.Bartholomew were ghting each other in the skies. Similarlythe English would cry in bale on St. George and the Frenchon St. Denis; but they did not seriously believe that St. Georgehated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St. Denis. Joanof Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many mod-ern 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 andmore 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 themselvesat war. That the great Spanish ships were named aer St.Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean lile tothe new England; soon it was to mean something almost cos-mically conicting, as if they were named aer Baal or Thor.These are indeed mere symbols; but the process of which theyare symbols was very practical and must be seriously fol-lowed. There entered with the religious wars the idea whichmodern science applies to racial wars; the idea of natural wars



37

the age of the PurItans

not arising from a special quarrel but from the nature of thepeople quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism rst fellacross our path, and far away in distance and darkness some-thing moved that men had almost forgoen.

Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land,as loose and driing 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 andwest lay on its wild forces like a light frost. This semi-civilizedworld had long been asleep; but it had begun to dream. In

the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with all hisviolence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried outin his sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of

bad customs, but largely also against the place of good worksin the Christian scheme. In the generation aer Elizabeth thespread of the new wild doctrines in the old wild lands hadsucked Central Europe into a cyclic war of creeds. In this thehouse which stood for the legend of the Holy Roman Empire,Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the oldreligion against a league of other Germans ghting for thenew. The continental conditions were indeed complicated,and grew more and more complicated as the dream of restor-ing religious unity receded. They were complicated by therm determination of France to be a nation in the full modernsense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; apurpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants athome, to give diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad,simply because it preserved the balance of power againstthe gigantic confederation of Spaniards and Austrians. It iscomplicated by the rise of a Calvinistic and commercial powerin the Netherlands, logical, deant, defending its own inde-pendence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall

be right if we see the rst throes of the modern internationalproblems in what is called the Thirty Years’ War; whetherwe call it the revolt of 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. Swedentook a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to thehelp of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroismeverywhere exhibited oered a strange combination of moreand more complex strategic science with the most naked andcannibal cruelty. Other forces besides Sweden found a careerin the carnage. Far away to the north-east, in a sterile land offens, a small ambitious family of money-lenders who had be-come squires, vigilant, thriy, thoroughly selsh, rather thinlyadopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend their almostsavage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They werewell paid for it by step aer step of promotion; but at this

time their principality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg.Their own name was Hohenzollern.

XIII

The Age of the Puritans

We should be very much bored if we had to read an accoof the most exciting argument or string of adventures inwhich unmeaning words such as “snark” or “boojum” w

systematically substituted for the names of the chief charters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king was the alternative of becoming a snark or nally surrenderin

boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public e bition of a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a greection on the snark. Yet something very like this situais created by most modern aempts to tell the tale of the logical troubles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriewhile deferring to the fashionable distaste for theology ingeneration — or rather in the last generation. Thus the Putans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic fwhat they thought was pure religion; frequently they wato impose it on others; sometimes they only wanted to be

to practise it themselves; but in no case can justice be donto what was nest in their characters, as well as rst in ththoughts, if we never by any chance ask what “it” was ththey wanted to impose or to practise. Now, there was a gdeal that was very ne about many of the Puritans, whicalmost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the Putans. They are praised for things which they either regardwith indierence or more oen detested with frenzy — sureligious liberty. And yet they are quite insuciently undstood, and are even undervalued, in their logical case forthings they really did care about — such as Calvinism. Wmake the Puritans picturesque in a way they would viole

repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, exceponly thing in which they were interested at all.

We have seen that in the rst instance the new doctrinesEngland were simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, that is the only truth to be told about the maer. But it wfar otherwise with the individuals a generation or two ato whom the wreck of the Armada was already a legend national deliverance from Popery, as miraculous and almas remote as the deliverances of which they read so realiscally in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The auaccident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincidonly too well with their concentration on the non-Christi

parts of Scripture. It may have satised a certain Old Tesment sentiment of the election of the English being annouin the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was easily turinto that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier hupon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized stamay fall from being a Christian nation to being a ChosenPeople. But even if their nationalism was of a kind that hultimately proved perilous to the comity of nations, it stinationalism. From rst to last the Puritans were patriots,point in which they had a marked superiority over the FrHuguenots. Politically, they were indeed at rst but one wof the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Churcand were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while the



38


ere all merely the creatures of the great spoliation, many ofem were the unconscious creatures of it. They were stronglypresented in the aristocracy, but a great number were of theiddle classes, though almost wholly the middle classes ofe towns. By the poor agricultural population, which wasll by far the largest part of the population, they were simplyrided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that,

hile they led the nation in many of its higher departments,ey could produce nothing having the atmosphere of whatrather priggishly called folklore. All the popular tradition

ere is, as in songs, toasts, rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royal-. About the Puritans we can nd no great legend. We mustut up as best we can with great literature.

ll these things, however, are simply things that other peopleight have noticed about them; they are not the most impor-nt things, and certainly not the things they thought aboutemselves. The soul of the movement was in two concep-

ons, or rather in two steps, the rst being the moral processwhich they arrived at their chief conclusion, and the sec-d the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin withe rst, especially as it was this which determined all that ex-rnal social aitude which struck the eye of contemporaries.he honest Puritan, growing up in youth in a world sweptre by the great pillage, possessed himself of a rst principlehich is one of the three or four alternative rst principleshich are possible to the mind of man. It was the principleat the mind of man can alone directly deal with the mind ofod. It may shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle;ut it really applies, and he really applied it, to many thingssides the sacraments of the Church. It equally applies, andequally applied it, to art, to leers, to the love of locality,music, and even to good manners. The phrase about noiest coming between a man and his Creator is but an im-verished fragment of the full philosophic doctrine; the true

uritan was equally clear that no singer or story-teller or d-

er must translate the voice of God to him into the tongues ofrrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of ge-us in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion;nounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his ownmirers to read his own admirable novels. Now, the English

uritans were not only Puritans but Englishmen, and there-re did not always shine in clearness of head; as we shall see,ue Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an English thing. Butis was the driving power and the direction; and the doctrinequite tenable if a trie insane. Intellectual truth was the onlybute t for the highest truth of the universe; and the next

ep in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thoughtas the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose

om instinct as well as tradition, taught him a concept of themnipotence of God which meant simply the impotence ofan. In Luther, the earlier and milder form of the Protestantocess only went so far as to say that nothing a man diduld help him except his confession of Christ; with Calvin itok the last logical step and said that even this could not helpm, since Omnipotence must have disposed of all his destinyforehand; that men must be created to be lost and saved.the purer types of whom I speak this logic was white-hot,d we must read the formula into all their parliamentary and

gal formulæ. When we read, “The Puritan party demandedforms in the church,” we must understand, “The Puritanrty demanded fuller and clearer armation that men are

created to be lost and saved.” When we read, “The Army se-lected persons for their godliness,” we must understand, “TheArmy selected those persons who seemed most convincedthat men are created to be lost and saved.” It should be addedthat this terrible trend was not conned even to Protestantcountries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed it untilstopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be apermanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age forthe immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christiansor non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which

nearly captured Canterbury and even Rome by the genius andheroism of Pascal or Milton, without crying out, like the ladyin Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, “How splendid! How glorious!…and oh what an escape!”

The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was in a true sense self-government; and yet, fora particular reason, turned out to be a rather selsh self-gov-ernment. It was equal and yet it was exclusive. Internally thesynod or conventicle tended to be a small republic, but unfor-tunately to be a very small republic. In relation to the streetoutside the conventicle was not a republic but an aristocracy.It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the elect; forit was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and aloneof all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence wehave, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of realrepublican virtue; a deance of tyrants, an assertion of humandignity, but above all an appeal to that rst of all republicanvirtues — publicity. One of the Regicides, on trial for his life,struck the note which all the unnaturalness of his school can-not deprive of nobility: “This thing was not done in a corner.”But their most drastic idealism did nothing to recover a rayof the light that at once lightened every man that came intothe world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptizedpeople. They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaold atwhich the Regicide was not afraid to point. They were cer-

tainly public, they may have been public-spirited, they werenever popular; and it seems never to have crossed their mindsthat there was any need to be popular. England was never solile of a democracy as during the short time when she was arepublic.

The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage inour history, arose from an alliance, which some may thinkan accidental alliance, between two things. The rst was thisintellectual fashion of Calvinism which aected the culturedworld as did our recent intellectual fashion of Collectivism.The second was the older thing which had made that creedand perhaps that cultured world possible — the aristocraticrevolt under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story

of a father and a son dragging down the same golden im-age, but the younger really from hatred of idolatry, and theolder solely from love of gold. It is at once the tragedy andthe paradox of England that it was the eternal passion thatpassed, and the transient or terrestrial passion that remained.This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland; andthat is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that endedat Worcester. The rst change had indeed been much the samematerialist maer in both countries — a mere brigandage of

barons; and even John Knox, though he has become a nationalhero, was an extremely anti-national politician. The patriotparty in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton and Mary

Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did become popular in



39

the age of the PurItans

the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in ourown land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing,and was mixed with Parliamentary and other oligarchies. InEngland Parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing, and wasmixed with Puritanism. When the storm began to rise againstCharles I., aer the more or less transitional time of his father,the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the instances commonlycited mark all the dierence between democratic religion andaristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny Geddes,the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English

legend is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raiseda county against the King. The Parliamentary movement inEngland was, indeed, almost wholly a thing of squires, withtheir new allies the merchants. They were squires who maywell have regarded themselves as the real and natural leadersof the English; but they were leaders who allowed no mutinyamong their followers. There was certainly no Village Hamp-den in Hampden Village.

The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought from Scotland amore mediæval and therefore more logical view of their ownfunction; for the note of their nation was logic. It is a proverbthat James I. was a Scot and a pedant; it is hardly sucientlynoted that Charles I. also was not a lile of a pedant, be-ing very much of a Scot. He had also the virtues of a Scot,courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for thethings of the mind. Being somewhat Scoish, he was veryun-English, and could not manage a compromise: he triedinstead to split hairs, and seemed merely to break promises.Yet he might safely have been far more inconsistent if he had

been a lile hearty and hazy; but he was of the sort that seeseverything in black and white; and it is therefore remem-

bered — especially the black. From the rst he fenced with hisParliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as aforeigner. The issue is familiar, and we need not be so carefulas the gentleman who wished to nish the chapter in order to

nd out what happened to Charles I. His minister, the greatStraord, was foiled in an aempt to make him strong inthe fashion of a French king, and perished on the scaold, afrustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of thepurse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at rstcarried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of theParliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and thepatience and genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the samedeath as his great servant.

Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, through ramicationsgenerally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve,into the great modern query of whether a King can raise taxeswithout the consent of his Parliament. The test case was that

of Hampden, the great Buckinghamshire magnate, who chal-lenged the legality of a tax which Charles imposed, profess-edly for a national navy. As even innovators always of neces-sity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires made alegend of the mediæval Magna Carta; and they were so far ina true tradition that the concession of John had really been,as we have already noted, anti-despotic without being demo-cratic. These two truths cover two parts of the problem of theStuart fall, which are of very dierent certainty, and should beconsidered separately.

For the rst point about democracy, no candid person, in faceof the facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to

hold that the seventeenth-century Parliament was ghting for

the truth; it is not possible to hold that it was ghting forpopulace. Aer the autumn of the Middle Ages Parliamewas always actively aristocratic and actively anti-populaThe institution which forbade Charles I. to raise Ship Mowas the same institution which previously forbade RichaII. to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and mials from Charles I. was the same which aerward claimecommon lands from the village communities. It was the sinstitution which only two generations before had eagerlhelped to destroy, not merely things of popular sentimen

like the monasteries, but all the things of popular utility the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeedcertainly had, another more patriotic and creative side; bwas exclusively the work of the great lords that was doneParliament. The House of Commons has itself been a HoLords.

But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect ofcampaign against the Stuarts, we come to something mumore dicult to dismiss and much more easy to justify.While the stupidest things are said against the Stuarts, threal contemporary case for their enemies is lile realizedit is connected with what our insular history most neglecthe condition of the Continent. It should be rememberedthough the Stuarts failed in England they fought for thinthat succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, rst, the eof the Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protant see Stuart Catholicism not at all as the last icker of old ame, but as the spread of a conagration. Charles IIinstance, was a man of strong, sceptical, and almost irritahumorous intellect, and he was quite certainly, and evenluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The and more important maer here was the almost awful auracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It wmore logical, and in many ways more equal and even eq

table than the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyin case of rebellion or even resistance. There were none orough English safeguards of juries and good customs of old common law; there was lere de cachet as unanswerabmagic. The English who deed the law were beer o ththe French; a French satirist would probably have retortethat it was the English who obeyed the law who were woo than the French. The ordering of men’s normal lives wwith the squire; but he was, if anything, more limited whwas the magistrate. He was stronger as master of the vill

but actually weaker as agent of the King. In defending thstate of things, in short, the Whigs were certainly not defing democracy, but they were in a real sense defending li

They were even defending some remains of mediæval libthough not the best; the jury though not the guild. Even fdalism had involved a localism not without liberal elemewhich lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who lovsuch things might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of thState, which for Hobbes was a single monster and for Frasingle man.

As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far aPuritanism was pure, it was unfortunately passing. And very type of the transition by which it passed can be founthat extraordinary man who is popularly credited with ming it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in history much l

the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism. H



40


ndoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all hise, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; buthe emerges into importance, he stands more and more fore Positivism of the English as compared with the Puritanismthe Scotch. He is one of the Puritan squires; but he is steadi-more of the squire and less of the Puritan; and he points toe process by which the squirearchy became at last merelygan. This is the key to most of what is praised and mostwhat is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity,leration and modern eciency of many of his departures;

e key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism,d lack of sympathy in many others. He was the reverse ofidealist; and he cannot without absurdity be held up asideal; but he was, like most of the squires, a type genu-

ely English; not without public spirit, certainly not withouttriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyedimpersonal and ideal government, had something Englishits very unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, wast primarily his, and certainly not characteristically his. It

as a concession to the high inhuman ideals of the tiny grouptrue Puritans, with whom he had to compromise but with

hom he aerwards collided. It was logic rather than crueltythe act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with bestial

uelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusivenessgarded as beasts — or as the modern euphemism would

ut it, as aborigines. But his practical temper was more akinsuch human slaughter on what seemed to him the edgescivilization, than to a sort of human sacrice in the veryntre and forum of it; he is not a representative regicide.a sense that piece of headsmanship was rather above hisad. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or vision;d he was not troubled with visions. But the true collisiontween the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-ntury movement came symbolically on that day of drivingorm at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruledslie and forced him down into the valley to be the victim

the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell said that Godd delivered them into his hand; but it was their own Godho delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinisteams, as overpowering as a nightmare — and as passing.

was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed onat day; it was the Englishman with his aristocratic compro-ise; and even what followed Cromwell’s death, the Res-ration, was an aristocratic compromise, and even a Whigmpromise. The mob might cheer as for a mediæval king;

ut the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of a piecean the mob understood. Even in the supercial things whereere seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus

e Puritan régime had risen chiey by one thing unknown toediævalism — militarism. Picked professional troops, harsh-drilled but highly paid, were the new and alien instrumentwhich the Puritans became masters. These were disbanded

d their return resisted by Tories and Whigs; but their returnemed always imminent, because it was in the spirit of thew stern world of the Thirty Years’ War. A discovery is ancurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowduld be turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger andoser crowds. Similarly the remains of Christmas were res-ed from the Puritans; but they had eventually to be rescuedain by Dickens from the Utilitarians, and may yet have torescued by somebody from the vegetarians and teetotallers.

The strange army passed and vanished almost like a Mosleminvasion; but it had made the dierence that armed valourand victory always make, if it was but a negative dierence.It was the nal break in our history; it was a breaker of manythings, and perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It issomething of a verbal symbol that these men founded NewEngland in America, for indeed they tried to found it here.By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in the verynakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage thingsthey invoked became more savage in becoming more new.

In observing what is called their Jewish Sabbath, they wouldhave had to stone the strictest Jew. And they (and indeedtheir age generally) turned witch-burning from an episode toan epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed disap-peared together; but they remain as something nobler than thenibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continuedtheir work. They were above all things anti-historic, like theFuturists in Italy; and there was this unconscious greatnessabout them, that their very sacrilege was public and solemnlike a sacrament; and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts.It was, properly considered, but a very secondary example oftheir strange and violent simplicity that one of them, beforea mighty mob at Whitehall, cut o the anointed head of the

sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away inthe western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, fromwhich had grown the whole story of Britain.



41

the trIumPh of the whIgs

XIV

The Triumph of the Whigs

Whether or no we believe that the Reformation really re-formed, there can be lile doubt that the Restoration did notreally restore. Charles II. was never in the old sense a King; he

was a Leader of the Opposition to his own Ministers. Be-cause he was a clever politician he kept his ocial post, and

because his brother and successor was an incredibly stupidpolitician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one ofthe ocial posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II. was edfor the more modern world then beginning; he was rather aneighteenth-century than a seventeenth-century man. He wasas wiy as a character in a comedy; and it was already thecomedy of Sheridan and not of Shakespeare. He was moremodern yet when he enjoyed the pure experimentalism ofthe Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys that were togrow into the terrible engines of science. He and his brother,however, had two links with what was in England the los-

ing side; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause waslost. The rst, which lessened in its practical pressure as timepassed, was, of course, the hatred felt for their religion. Thesecond, which grew as it neared the next century, was theirtie with the French Monarchy. We will deal with the religiousquarrel before passing on to a much more irreligious age; butthe truth about it is tangled and far from easy to trace.

The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion beforethey had ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitionalcomplexities that can only be conveyed by such contradic-tions. A person of the type and time of Elizabeth wouldfeel fundamentally, and even ercely, that priests should be

celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught talkingto the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be veryvariously explained, covered the Church of England, and in agreat degree the people of England. Whether it be called theCatholic continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extir-pation of Catholicism, there can be no doubt that a parson likeHerrick, for instance, as late as the Civil War, was stued with“superstitions” which were Catholic in the extreme sense weshould now call Continental. Yet many similar parsons hadalready a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of Con-tinental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ,

but as the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, veryhard now to guess the proportion of Protestantism; but there

is no doubt about its presence, especially its presence in cen-tres of importance like London. By the time of Charles II., aerthe purge of the Puritan Terror, it had become something atleast more inherent and human than the mere exclusiveness ofCalvinist creeds or the cra of Tudor nobles. The Monmouthrebellion showed that it had a popular, though an insucient-ly popular, backing. The “No Popery” force became the crowdif it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly anurban crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detaileddelusion with which sensational journalism plays on theurban crowds of to-day. One of these scares and scoops (notto add the less technical name of lies) was the Popish Plot, astorm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the Tale of

the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a stormnally swept away James II.

The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for of those illogical but almost lovable localisms to which thEnglish temperament is prone. The debate about the Chuof England, then and now, diers from most debates in ovital point. It is not a debate about what an institution outo do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but abouwhat that institution actually is. One party, then as now, cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only ca

for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certhappened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotchor the Irish. Masses of common people loved the ChurchEngland without having even decided what it was. It hadhold dierent indeed from that of the mediæval Church,also very dierent from the barren prestige of gentility wclung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a wdierent purpose in mind, devotes some pages to provinthat an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper sevant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right; butdoes not guess that this was but the degenerate continuitthe more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages. A pwas not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was treatedas a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, manyentertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing gentility. In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a fashion that was emotionally vivid thointellectually vague. When, therefore, James II. seemed tomenace this practising communion, he aroused somethinleast more popular than the mere priggishness of the Whlords. To this must be added a fact generally forgoen. I the fact that the inuence then called Popish was then in real sense regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed tthe English not merely a conspirator but a sort of anarchiThere is something appalling about abstract speculations

many Englishmen; and the abstract speculations of JesuitSuarez dealt with extreme democracy and things undreaof here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thto many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeecentury Englishmen who had something of this transcental abstraction were the Quakers; and the cosy English copromise shuddered when the two things shook hands. Fowas something much more than a Stuart intrigue which mthese philosophical extremes meet, merely because they philosophical; and which brought the weary but humoromind of Charles II. into alliance with the subtle and detacspirit of William Penn.

Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart

scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemtheoretical and therefore fanciful. It was in advance of itsor (to use a more intelligent language) too thin and etherfor its atmosphere. And to this aection for the actual in English moderates must be added (in what proportion wknow not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almost maniac

but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, beturned to an engine of torture against priests and the frieof priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nan

but the English persecutors never had so tolerant an edicrevoke. But at least by this time the English, like the Frenpersecutors were oppressing a minority. Unfortunately th

was another province of government in which they were



42


ore madly persecuting the majority. For it was here thatme to its climax and took on its terric character that linger-g crime that was called the government of Ireland. It wouldke too long to detail the close network of unnatural laws byhich that country was covered till towards the end of theghteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole at-ude to the Irish was tragically typied, and tied up with ourpulsion of the Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remem-red for ever. James II., eeing from the opinion of London,rhaps of England, eventually found refuge in Ireland,

hich took arms in his favour. The Prince of Orange, whome aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in thatuntry with an English and Dutch army, won the Bale ofe Boyne, but saw his army successfully arrested before Lim-ick by the military genius of Patrick Sarseld. The check wascomplete that peace could only be restored by promisingmplete religious liberty to the Irish, in return for the surren-r of Limerick. The new English Government occupied thewn and immediately broke the promise. It is not a maer onhich there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessityat the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragicat the English forgot it. For he who has forgoen his sin ispeating it incessantly for ever.

ut here again the Stuart position was much more vulner-le on the side of secular policy, and especially of foreignlicy. The aristocrats to whom power passed nally at thevolution were already ceasing to have any supernaturalth in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they had ary natural faith in England as against France; and even, in artain sense, in English institutions as against French institu-

ons. And just as these men, the most unmediæval of man-nd, could yet boast about some mediæval liberties, Magnaarta, the Parliament and the Jury, so they could appeal to aue mediæval legend in the maer of a war with France. Apical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole could

mplain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him withaces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when heas looking for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could saywith all the naïveté of scepticism, and never dream how far

way from John of Gaunt he was really wandering in saying. But though their notion of mediæval history was a mereasquerade ball, it was one in which men ghting the Frenchuld still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of theack Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In thisaer, in short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats werepular as patriots will always be popular. It is true that the

st Stuarts were themselves far from unpatriotic; and Jamesin particular may well be called the founder of the British

avy. But their sympathies were with France, among otherreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder befored the younger aer his period of rule; and France aidede later Jacobite eorts to restore their line. And for the new

ngland, especially the new English nobility, France was theemy.

he transformation through which the external relations ofngland passed at the end of the seventeenth century is sym-lized by two very separate and denite steps; the rst thecession of a Dutch king and the second the accession of aerman king. In the rst were present all the features that canrtially make an unnatural thing natural. In the second we

ve the condition in which even those eecting it can hardly

call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orangewas like a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreigngun indeed, and one red in a quarrel more foreign thanEnglish, but still a quarrel in which the English, and espe-cially the English aristocrats, could play a great part. Georgeof Hanover was simply something stued into a hole in thewall by English aristocrats, who practically admied that theywere simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William,cynical as he was, carried on the legend of the greater andgrimmer Puritanism. He was in private conviction a Calvin-

ist; and nobody knew or cared what George was except thathe was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly republicanmagistrate of what had once been a purely republican experi-ment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seven-teenth century. George was when he was at home prey muchwhat the King of the Cannibal Islands was when he was athome — a savage personal ruler scarcely logical enough to becalled a despot. William was a man of acute if narrow intelli-gence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above all, touch-ing the immediate eect produced, William was married to aStuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart;he was a familiar gure, and already a part of our royal fam-ily. With George there entered England something that had

scarcely been seen there before; something hardly mentionedin mediæval or Renascence writing, except as one mentions aHoentot — the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.

The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period betweenthese two foreign kings, is therefore the true time of transitionIt is the bridge between the time when the aristocrats were atleast weak enough to call in a strong man to help them, andthe time when they were strong enough deliberately to callin a weak man who would allow them to help themselves. Tosymbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too much; butthe whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two greatgures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous

and clear about their own aims, and in everything else a vio-lent contrast at every point. One of them was Henry St. John,Lord Bolingbroke; the other was John Churchill, the famousand infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of Churchill isprimarily the story of the Revolution and how it succeeded;the story of Bolingbroke is the story of the Counter-Revolutionand how it failed.

Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, that hecombines the presence of glory with the absence of honour.When the new aristocracy had become normal to the nation,in the next few generations, it produced personal types notonly of aristocracy but of chivalry. The Revolution reduced usto a country wholly governed by gentlemen; the popular uni-

versities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds andabbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are — fac-tories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories ofsnobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the PublicSchools were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolutionthey were already becoming as private as they are now. But atleast in the eighteenth century there were great gentlemen inthe generous, perhaps too generous, sense now given to thetitle. Types not merely honest, but rash and romantic in theirhonesty, remain in the record with the names of Nelson or ofFox. We have already seen that the later reformers defacedfrom fanaticism the churches which the rst reformers had

defaced simply from avarice. Rather in the same way the



43

the trIumPh of the whIgs

eighteenth-century Whigs oen praised, in a spirit of puremagnanimity, what the seventeenth-century Whigs had donein a spirit of pure meanness. How mean was that meannesscan only be estimated by realizing that a great military herohad not even the ordinary military virtues of loyalty to hisag or obedience to his superior ocers, that he picked hisway through campaigns that have made him immortal withthe watchful spirit of a thieving camp-follower. When Wil-liam landed at Torbay on the invitation of the other Whignobles, Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation

of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of loveand loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the countryfrom invasion, and then calmly handed the army over to theinvader. To the nish of this work of art but few could aspire,

but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution wereupon this ethical paern. While they surrounded the throne of

James, there was scarcely one of them who was not in corre-spondence with William. When they aerwards surroundedthe throne of William, there was not one of them who wasnot still in correspondence with James. It was such men whodefeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick; it wassuch men who defeated Scotch Jacobitism by the treason ofGlencoe.

Thus the strange yet splendid story of eighteenth-centuryEngland is one of greatness founded on smallness, a pyra-mid standing on a point. Or, to vary the metaphor, the newmercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even in the exter-nals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy of Venice. Thesolidity was all in the superstructure; the uctuation had beenall in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and War-ren Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstableas water and as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course,to connect the unstable element with something restless andeven shiy in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly inthe genesis, if not in the later generations of our mercantile

aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something which hadalso been urged against a yet older example of that polity,something called Punica fdes. The great Royalist Straord,going disillusioned to death, had said, “Put not your trust inprinces.” The great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said tohave retorted, “And least of all in merchant princes.”

Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big in English history, but which with the recentwinding of the course of history has gone out of sight. Yetwithout grasping it we cannot understand our past, nor, I willadd, our future. Curiously enough, the best English booksof the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yet modernculture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of

it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule inIreland, as well as when he said that the devil was the rstWhig. Goldsmith is full of it; it is the whole point of that nepoem “The Deserted Village,” and is set out theoretically withgreat lucidity and spirit in “The Vicar of Wakeeld.” Swi isfull of it; and found in it an intellectual brotherhood-in-armswith Bolingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne it wasprobably the opinion of the majority of people in England. Butit was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to rule.

This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, hadmany aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point thatone of the virtues of a despot is distance. It is “the lile tyrant

of the elds” that poisons human life. The thesis involved the

truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhthe best thing. But it also involved the paradox that evenking is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobiand relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyranchiey tortures the torturers; and though Nero’s murder his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholrationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respecne and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinkDeist, a clear and classic writer of English. But he was als

a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political couraand he made one last throw for the Stuarts. It was defeat by the great Whig nobles who formed the commiee of tnew régime of the gentry. And considering who it was wdefeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was def

by a trick.

The small German prince ascended the throne, or ratherhoisted into it like a dummy, and the great English Royalwent into exile. Twenty years aerwards he reappears anreasserts his living and logical faith in a popular monarchBut it is typical of the whole detachment and distinction mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to strengtthe heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He waalways a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared fornot a royal family, but a royal oce. He celebrated it in hgreat book “The Patriot King,” wrien in exile; and whenthought that George’s great-grandson was enough of a phe only wished that he might be more of a king. He madhis old age yet another aempt, with such unpromising istruments as George III. and Lord Bute; and when these in his hand he died with all the dignity of the sed victa CaThe great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full statuBut if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, this no beer summary than this section from the rst to thof the foiled coups d’état of Bolingbroke. In the rst his po

made peace with France, and broke the connection with Atria. In the second his policy again made peace with Franand broke the connection with Prussia. For in that intervseed of the money-lending squires of Brandenburg had wmighty, and had already become that prodigy which has

become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end ofepoch Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at leaa representative sense, all that we call the British Empireat the height of his own and his country’s glory. He summrized the new England of the Revolution in everything, ecially in everything in which that movement seems to mato be intrinsically contradictory and yet was most corporconsistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways w

we should call a Liberal, like his son aer him; but he waan Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Wparty was consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrin the sense that all our public men were then aristocratshe was very emphatically what may be called a commercist — one might almost say Carthaginian. In this connectihe has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but wnot allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that hcould use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of mrank, James Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the Frenchof Quebec; it was a young clerk of the East India CompanRobert Clive, who threw open to the English the golden gof India. But it was precisely one of the strong points of t



44


ghteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded without frictione wealthier bourgeoisie; it was not there that the social cleav-e was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator,d though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was onegreat senators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble

oman phrases they oen used, which we are right in call-g classic, but wrong in calling cold. In some ways nothinguld be further from all this ne if orid scholarship, all thisincely and patrician geniality, all this air of freedom andventure on the sea, than the lile inland state of the stingy

ill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages intoere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in someays like a shadow of Chatham ung across the world — thert of shadow that is at once an enlargement and a caricature.

he English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patrio-m, saw here something drawn out long and thin out of their

wn theories. What was paganism in Chatham was atheismFrederick the Great. And what was in the rst patriotism

as in the second something with no name but Prussianism.he cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of itsture eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom.autocracy and our own aristocracy drew indirectly nearer

gether, and seemed for a time to be wedded; but not before

e great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture, as if to for-d the banns.

XV

The War with the Great Republics

We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as wesuppose that rhetoric is articial because it is artistic. We donot fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a

man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano“with much feeling,” or of his pouring out his soul by scrap-ing on cat-gut aer a training as careful as an acrobat’s. But weare still haunted with a prejudice that verbal form and verbaleect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the link

between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt thefeeling of the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are sorounded and pointed as to convey his feeling. Now before anycriticism of the eighteenth-century worthies must be put theproviso of their perfect artistic sincerity. Their oratory was un-rhymed poetry, and it had the humanity of poetry. It was noteven unmetrical poetry; that century is full of great phrases,oen spoken on the spur of great moments, which have in

them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinkingto a tune. Nelson’s “In honour I gained them, in honour I willdie with them,” has more rhythm than much that is calledvers libres. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death”might be a great line in Walt Whitman.

It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pre-tend to be bad speakers; but in fact the most English eigh-teenth-century epoch blazed with brilliant speakers. Theremay have been ner writing in France; there was no such nespeaking as in England. The Parliament had faults enough,

but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The Parliament wascorrupt, as it is now; though the examples of corruption were

then oen really made examples, in the sense of warnings,where they are now examples only in the sense of paerns.The Parliament was indierent to the constituencies, as it isnow; though perhaps the constituencies were less indier-ent to the Parliament. The Parliament was snobbish, as it isnow, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank and lessto mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it didfull its name and duty by talking, and trying to talk well.It did not merely do things because they do not bear talkingabout — as it does now. It was then, to the eternal glory of ourcountry, a great “talking-shop,” not a mere buying and sellingshop for nancial tips and ocial places. And as with anyother artist, the care the eighteenth-century man expended

on oratory is a proof of his sincerity, not a disproof of it. Anenthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and elaborate as alover’s sonnet; but it is because Burke is really enthusiastic,like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as carefullycompounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Ju-nius is really angry — like the poisoner. Now, nobody whohas realized this psychological truth can doubt for a momentthat many of the English aristocrats of the eighteenth centuryhad a real enthusiasm for liberty; their voices li like trum-pets upon the very word. Whatever their immediate forbearsmay have meant, these men meant what they said when theytalked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty ofMagna Carta. Those Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys



46


ap to their feet at once to explain that some men can beund, on careful examination, to be taller or handsomer thanhers. As if Danton had not noticed that he was taller thanobespierre, or as if Washington was not well aware that heas handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to expound ahilosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way of arable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we dot mean that they all look exactly the same. We mean thatey are absolutely equal in their one absolute character, ine most important thing about them. It may be put practi-

lly by saying that they are coins of a certain value, twelve ofhich go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically, and evenystically, by saying that they all bear the image of the King.nd, though the most mystical, it is also the most practicalmmary of equality that all men bear the image of the KingKings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long

nderlain all Christianity, even in institutions less popular inrm than were, for instance, the mob of mediæval republicsItaly. A dogma of equal duties implies that of equal rights.now of no Christian authority that would not admit that itas wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man, or as bad to

urgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully fur-shed one. But the world had wandered further and further

om these truisms, and nobody in the world was furtherom them than the group of the great English aristocrats. Theea of the equality of men is in substance simply the ideathe importance of man. But it was precisely the notion ofe importance of a mere man which seemed startling anddecent to a society whose whole romance and religion nownsisted of the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a mand walked naked into Parliament. There is not space here tovelop the moral issue in full, but this will suce to showat the critics concerned about the dierence in human typestalents are considerably wasting their time. If they can

nderstand how two coins can count the same though one isight and the other brown, they might perhaps understand

w two men can vote the same though one is bright and theher dull. If, however, they are still satised with their solidjection that some men are dull, I can only gravely agreeth them, that some men are very dull.

ut a few years aer Lafayee had returned from helpingfound a republic in America he was ung over his own

ontiers for resisting the foundation of a republic in France.furious was the onward stride of this new spirit that the

publican of the new world lived to be the reactionary of thed. For when France passed from theory to practice, the ques-on was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connec-on with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a

lonial coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like someonstrous immeasurable idol of iron, was melted down in arnace barely bigger than itself, and recast in a size equallylossal, but in a shape men could not understand. Many,least, could not understand it, and least of all the liberalistocracy of England. There were, of course, practical rea-ns for a continuous foreign policy against France, whetheryal or republican. There was primarily the desire to keepy foreigner from menacing us from the Flemish coast; thereas, to a much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which souch English glory had been gained by the statesmanshipChatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The formerason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order

to keep the French out of Flanders we ung ourselves withincreasing enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. Wepurposely fed and pampered the power which was destinedin the future to devour Belgium as France would never havedevoured it, and threaten us across the sea with terrors ofwhich no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed muchdeeper things unied our aitude towards France beforeand aer the Revolution. It is but one stride from despotismto democracy, in logic as well as in history; and oligarchy isequally remote from both. The Bastille fell, and it seemed to

an Englishman merely that a despot had turned into a demos.The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an Englishmanmerely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. Hewas not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the samealien thing; and that thing was equality. For when millions areequally subject to one law, it makes lile dierence if they arealso subject to one lawgiver; the general social life is a level.The one thing that the English have never understood aboutNapoleon, in all their myriad studies of his mysterious per-sonality, is how impersonal he was. I had almost said how un-important he was. He said himself, “I shall go down to historywith my code in my hand;” but in practical eects, as distinctfrom mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say

that his code will go down to history with his hand set to it insignature — somewhat illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has

broken up big estates and encouraged contented peasants inplaces where his name is cursed, in places where his name isalmost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it was natural thatthe annihilating splendour of his military strokes should rivetthe eye like ashes of lightning; but his rain fell more silently,and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here thataer bursting one world-coalition aer another by bales thatare the masterpieces of the military art, he was nally worndown by two comparatively popular causes, the resistanceof Russia and the resistance of Spain. The former was largely,like so much that is Russian, religious; but in the laer ap-

peared most conspicuously that which concerns us here, thevalour, vigilance and high national spirit of England in theeighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried andmade triumphant the great Irish soldier, aerwards known asWellington; who has become all the more symbolic since hewas nally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of thelaer at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at allEnglish, was in many ways typical of the aristocracy; he hadirony and independence of mind. But if we wish to realizehow rigidly such men remained limited by their class, howlile they really knew what was happening in their time, it isenough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he haddismissed Napoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman.If an acute and experienced Chinaman were to say of ChineseGordon, “He is not actually a Mandarin,” we should thinkthat the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being bothrigid and remote.

But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest anoth-er, and with it the reminder that this, though true, is inad-equate. There was some truth in the idea that the Englishmanwas never so English as when he was outside England, andnever smacked so much of the soil as when he was on the sea.There has run through the national psychology somethingthat has never had a name except the eccentric and indeedextraordinary name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more



47

arIstocracy and the dIscontents

English for being quite undiscoverable in England. It may bedoubted if a French or German boy especially wishes that hiscornland or vineland were a desert; but many an English boyhas wished that his island were a desert island. But we mighteven say that the Englishman was too insular for an island.He awoke most to life when his island was sundered fromthe foundations of the world, when it hung like a planet andew like a bird. And, by a contradiction, the real British armywas in the navy; the boldest of the islanders were scaeredover the moving archipelago of a great eet. There still lay on

it, like an increasing light, the legend of the Armada; it was agreat eet full of the glory of having once been a small one.Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had donetheir work, and shaered the French navy in the Spanish seas,leaving like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson,who died with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon hissleeve. There is no word for the memory of Nelson except tocall him mythical. The very hour of his death, the very nameof his ship, are touched with that epic completeness whichcritics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the handof God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose

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 he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the Englishthat is purely poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousandthings, and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recentdate, in an age of reason, in a country already calling itselfdull and business-like, with top-hats and factory chimneysalready beginning to rise like towers of funereal eciency,this country clergyman’s son moved to the last in a luminouscloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson tothose who do not understand England, and a mystery to thosewho think they do. In outward action he led his ships to vic-tory and died upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he estab-lished something indescribable and intimate, something thatsounds like a native proverb; he was the man who burnt his

ships, and who for ever set the Thames on re.

XVI

Aristocracy and the Discontents

It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they areintrinsically delicate and are only mechanically made duAny one who has seen the rst white light, when it come

by a window, knows that daylight is not only as beautifuas mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the colousunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism, and ecially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumverbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous atender as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the chapter ended, might very well summarize the maer; foname is banged and beaten about like an old tin can, whsoul had something in it of a ne and fragile eighteenth-ry vase. And it will be found that the most threadbare thicontemporary and connected with him have a real truth the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us thave too oen degenerated into dead jokes. The expressi

“hearts of oak,” for instance, is no unhappy phrase for thner side of that England of which he was the best expreEven as a material metaphor it covers much of what I meoak was by no means only made into bludgeons, nor eveonly into bale-ships; and the English gentry did not thin

business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere namoak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiorcolleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, ndegenerate, almost made Latin an English language and an English wine. Some part of that world at least will notish; for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the grEnglish portrait-painters, who, more than any other men

were given the power to commemorate the large humaniof their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and sotheir own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotangle, upon a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladlike landscapes, as great and as unconscious with reposeyou will note how subtly the artist gives to a dress owinthe foreground something of the divine quality of distanThen you will understand another faded phrase and worspoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fre

before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like wordshave never heard before: “For England, home, and beaut

When I think of these things, I have no temptation to megrumbling at the great gentry that waged the great war o

fathers. But indeed the diculty about it was something deeper than could be dealt with by any grumbling. It waexclusive class, but not an exclusive life; it was interestedthings, though not for all men. Or rather those things it fato include, through the limitations of this rationalist inter

between mediæval and modern mysticism, were at least of the sort to shock us with supercial inhumanity. The gest gap in their souls, for those who think it a gap, was thcomplete and complacent paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead; those who heldstill, like the great Johnson, were considered eccentrics. TFrench Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formfuneral of Christianity; and was followed by various othe



48


mplications, including the corpse coming to life. But theepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not connedthe Hell-Fire Club; which might in virtue of its vivid nameregarded as relatively orthodox. It is present in the mildest

iddle-class atmosphere; as in the middle-class masterpieceout “Northanger Abbey,” where we actually remember it isantiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed

ere is no clearer case of it than what can only be called theheism of Jane Austen.

nfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman,

of another gallant and gracious individual, that his honourood rooted in dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in thesition of such an aristocrat in a romance, whose splendours the dark spot of a secret and a sort of blackmail. Thereas, to begin with, an uncomfortable paradox in the tale ofs pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descendedom the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but hemself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory didt come from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His

thers had not come over with William the Conqueror, butly assisted, in a somewhat shuing manner, at the cominger of William of Orange. His own exploits were oen reallymantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans or the war of theooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-o founders of hismily that were painfully realistic. In this the great gentryere more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than oforman knights, but their position was worse; for the mar-als might be descended from peasants and shopkeepers;

ut the oligarchs were descended from usurers and thieves.hat, for good or evil, was the paradox of England; the typicalistocrat was the typical upstart.

ut the secret was worse; not only was such a family foundedstealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim

uth that all through the eighteenth century, all through theeat Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory

eeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandewashd Plassy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, oneocess was steadily going on in the central senate of the na-

on. Parliament was passing bill aer bill for the enclosure, bye great landlords, of such of the common lands as had sur-ved out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages.is much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony ofr history, that the Commons were destroying the commons.

he very word “common,” as we have before noted, lost itseat moral meaning, and became a mere topographical termr some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was not worthealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingeringmmons were connected only with stories about highway-

en, which still linger in our literature. The romance of themas a romance of robbers; but not of the real robbers.

his was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that theymained human, and yet ruined humanity all around them.

heir own ideal, nay their own reality of life, was really morenerous and genial than the sti savagery of Puritan cap-ns and Prussian nobles; but the land withered under their

mile as under an alien frown. Being still at least English,ey were still in their way good-natured; but their positionas false, and a false position forces the good-natured intoutality. The French Revolution was the challenge that reallyvealed to the Whigs that they must make up their minds to

really democrats or admit that they were really aristocrats.

They decided, as in the case of their philosophic exponentBurke, to be really aristocrats; and the result was the WhiteTerror, the period of Anti-Jacobin repression which revealedthe real side of their sympathies more than any stricken eldsin foreign lands. Cobbe, the last and greatest of the yeo-men, of the small farming class which the great estates weredevouring daily, was thrown into prison merely for protestingagainst the ogging of English soldiers by German mercenar-ies. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful meeting which wascalled the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were indeed

employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones.And it is one of the bier satires that cling to the very continu-ity of our history, that such suppression of the old yeomanspirit was the work of soldiers who still bore the title of theYeomanry.

The name of Cobbe is very important here; indeed it isgenerally ignored because it is important. Cobbe was theone man who saw the tendency of the time as a whole, andchallenged it as a whole; consequently he went without sup-port. It is a mark of our whole modern history that the massesare kept quiet with a ght. They are kept quiet by the ght

because it is a sham-ght; thus most of us know by this timethat the Party System has been popular only in the same sensethat a football match is popular. The division in Cobbe’stime was slightly more sincere, but almost as supercial; itwas a dierence of sentiment about externals which dividedthe old agricultural gentry of the eighteenth century from thenew mercantile gentry of the nineteenth. Through the rsthalf of the nineteenth century there were some real disputes

between the squire and the merchant. The merchant becameconverted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, andaccused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keepup his agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not inef-fectively by accusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor byoverworking them in his factories to keep up his commercial

success. The passing of the Factory Acts was a confession ofthe cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of thecomparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, whohad destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that mighthave defended the eld against the factory. These relativelyreal disputes would bring us to the middle of the Victorianera. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cob-

be had seen and said that the disputes were only relativelyreal. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust fashion,that they were not real at all. He would have said that theagricultural pot and the industrial kele were calling eachother black, when they had both been blackened in the same

kitchen. And he would have been substantially right; for thegreat industrial disciple of the kele, James Wa (who learntfrom it the lesson of the steam engine), was typical of the agein this, that he found the old Trade Guilds too fallen, unfash-ionable and out of touch with the times to help his discovery,so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had warredon and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. Therewas no prosperous peasant’s pot, such as Henry of Navarreinvoked, to enter into alliance with the kele. In other words,there was in the strict sense of the word no commonwealth,

because wealth, though more and more wealthy, was less andless common. Whether it be a credit or discredit, industrialscience and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the



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arIstocracy and the dIscontents

old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been readyfor new experiments — beginning with the Reformation.And it is characteristic of the clear mind which was hiddenfrom many by the hot temper of Cobbe, that he did see theReformation as the root of both squirearchy and industrial-ism, and called on the people to break away from both. Thepeople made more eort to do so than is commonly realized.There are many silences in our somewhat snobbish history;and when the educated class can easily suppress a revolt, theycan still more easily suppress the record of it. It was so with

some of the chief features of that great mediæval revolutionthe failure of which, or rather the betrayal of which, was thereal turning-point of our history. It was so with the revoltsagainst the religious policy of Henry VIII.; and it was so withthe rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbe’s epoch.The real mob reappeared for a moment in our history, for justlong enough to show one of the immortal marks of the realmob — ritualism. There is nothing that strikes the undemocrat-ic doctrinaire so sharply about direct democratic action as thevanity or mummery of the things done seriously in the day-light; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem ora prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prisonmerely because it was large and solid and dicult to storm,

and therefore symbolic of the mighty monarchical machineryof which it had been but the shed. The English rioters labori-ously broke in pieces a parish grindstone, merely becauseit was large and solid and dicult to break, and thereforesymbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which perpetu-ally ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressiveagent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round thecounty, merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heavenand earth. Aerwards they let him go, which marks perhaps,for good or evil, a certain national modication of the move-ment. There is something very typical of an English revolutionin having the tumbril without the guillotine.

Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trod-den out very brutally; the grindstone continued (and contin-ues) to grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to, and,in most political crises since, it is the crowd that has founditself in the cart. But, of course, both the riot and repression inEngland were but shadows of the awful revolt and vengeancewhich crowned the parallel process in Ireland. Here the ter-rorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool of thearistocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at all con-sonant to their temperament, which had neither the crueltyand morbidity nor the logic and xity of terrorism), becamein a more spiritual atmosphere a aming sword of religiousand racial insanity. Pi, the son of Chatham, was quite unt

to ll his father’s place, unt indeed (I cannot but think) to llthe place commonly given him in history. But if he was whollyworthy of his immortality, his Irish expedients, even if consid-ered as immediately defensible, have not been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the national needto raise coalition aer coalition against Napoleon, by pour-ing the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to Englandupon her poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talentand pertinacity. He was at the same time faced with a hostileIrish rebellion and a partly or potentially hostile Irish Parlia-ment. He broke the laer by the most indecent bribery and theformer by the most indecent brutality, but he may well havethought himself entitled to the tyrant’s plea. But not only were

his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril, but (is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of them they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emanpate Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vthe oligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmsuch. He did not really want to enlist Ireland like a recrusimply to disarm Ireland like an enemy. Hence his selemwas from the rst in a false position for seling anythingThe Union may have been a necessity, but the Union wasa Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has e

treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded in mIreland English, as Burgundy has been made French, buthave never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, thoCorneille was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland

boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has involved us in a contradiction; we have tried to combine identication wiperiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishmhe gures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he guresIrishman. So the Union has never even applied English lato Ireland, but only coercions and concessions both specidesigned for Ireland. From Pi’s time to our own this toing alternation has continued; from the time when the grO’Connell, with his monster meetings, forced our govern

to listen to Catholic Emancipation to the time when the gParnell, with his obstruction, forced it to listen to Home Rour staggering equilibrium has been maintained by blowfrom without. In the later nineteenth century the beer sof special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather beedly realized that the freedom he loved in Greece and Itahad its rights nearer home, and may be said to have founsecond youth in the gateway of the grave, in the eloquenand emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearinthe opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spirituinsight to see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was more resolved to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, gene

imaginative, a man among politicians, insisted that the aian agony of evictions, shootings, and rack-rentings shouend with the individual Irish geing, as Parnell had put igrip on their farms. In more ways than one his work rouno almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion againPi, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leaderthe rebels, and he wrought the only reparation yet made all the blood, shamefully shed, that owed around the faFitzGerald.

The eect on England was less tragic; indeed, in a sense was comic. Wellington, himself an Irishman though of thnarrower party, was preeminently a realist, and, like man

Irishmen, was especially a realist about Englishmen. He sthe army he commanded was the scum of the earth; and remark is none the less valuable because that army proveitself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But truth it was in this something of a national symbol and thguardian, as it were, of a national secret. There is a paradabout the English, even as distinct from the Irish or the Swhich makes any formal version of their plans and princinevitably unjust to them. England not only makes her raparts out of rubbish, but she nds ramparts in what she hherself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing tothat even its failures have been successes, there is truth intribute. Some of the best colonies were convict selemen



50


d might be called abandoned convict selements. The armyas largely an army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery;

ut it was a good army of bad men; nay, it was a gay army ofnfortunate men. This is the colour and the character that hasn through the realities of English history, and it can hardlyput in a book, least of all a historical book. It has its ashesour fantastic ction and in the songs of the street, but its

ue medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity.n illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul.survived, perhaps, with only too much patience, the time

terrorism in which the more serious Irish rose in revolt.hat time was full of a quite topsy-turvey tyranny, and thenglish humorist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he oenceives a quite irrational sentence in a police court by sayingwill do it on his head. So, under Pi’s coercionist régime, a

an was sent to prison for saying that George IV. was fat; bute feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by thetistic contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty,at sort of humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeedrvive all the dri and downward eddy of an evil economicstem, as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epoch ande drearier menace of materialistic social science, as embod-d in the new Puritans, who have puried themselves even

religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be saidthat the English humorist has been slowly driven down-ards in the social scale. Falsta was a knight, Sam Welleras a gentleman’s servant, and some of our recent restrictionsem designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the Art-l Dodger. But well it was for us that some such trampledadition and dark memory of Merry England survived; wellr us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed andour statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to

me the noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation,which all the daily workers of a dull civilization were to belled out of their houses and their holes like a resurrection ofe dead, and le naked under a strange sun with no religion

ut a sense of humour. And men might know of what nationakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes ine darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heardose boys in France and Flanders who called out “Earlyoors!” themselves in a theatrical memory, as they went sorly in their youth to break down the doors of death.

XVII

The Return of the Barbarian

The only way to write a popular history, as we have alreadyremarked, would be to write it backwards. It would be to takecommon objects of our own street and tell the tale of how each

of them came to be in the street at all. And for my immediatepurpose it is really convenient to take two objects we haveknown all our lives, as features of fashion or respectability.One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a top-hatthe other, which is still a customary formality, is a pair of trou-sers. The history of these humorous objects really does givea clue to what has happened in England for the last hundredyears. It is not necessary to be an æsthete in order to regard

both objects as the reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational side of beauty. The lines of human limbscan be beautiful, and so can the lines of loose drapery, butnot cylinders too loose to be the rst and too tight to be thesecond. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to see that

while there are hundreds of dierently proportioned hats, ahat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhattop-heavy. But what is largely forgoen is this, that these twofantastic objects, which now strike the eye as unconsciousfreaks, were originally conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to dothem justice, did not think them casual or commonplace; theythought them, if not ridiculous, at least rococo. The top-hatwas 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 orientaltouch in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded aseeminately oriental; it was an oriental touch found in many

orid things of the time — in Byron’s poems or Brighton Pavil-ion. Now, the interesting point is that for a whole serious cen-tury these instantaneous fantasies have remained like fossils.In the carnival of the Regency a few fools got into fancy dress,and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, we haveremained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.

I say this is typical of the most important thing that happenedin the Victorian time. For the most important thing was thatnothing happened. The very fuss that was made about minormodications brings into relief the rigidity with which themain lines of social life were le as they were at the FrenchRevolution. We talk of the French Revolution as somethingthat changed the world; but its most important relation to

England is that it did not change England. A student of ourhistory is concerned rather with the eect it did not have thanthe eect it did. If it be a splendid fate to have survived theFlood, the English oligarchy had that added splendour. Buteven for the countries in which the Revolution was a convul-sion, it was the last convulsion — until that which shakesthe world to-day. It gave their character to all the common-wealths, which all talked about progress, and were occupiedin marking time. Frenchmen, under all supercial reactions,remained republican in spirit, as they had been when theyrst wore top-hats. Englishmen, under all supercial reforms,remained oligarchical in spirit, as they had been when theyrst wore trousers. Only one power might be said to be grow-



51

the r eturn of the BarBarIan

ing, and that in a plodding and prosaic fashion — the powerin the North-East whose name was Prussia. And the Englishwere more and more learning that this growth need causethem no alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in

blood and their brothers in spirit.

The rst thing to note, then, about the nineteenth century isthat Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe ofthe great war, and that England especially remained herself ascompared even with the rest of Europe. Granted this, we maygive their proper importance to the cautious internal changes

in this country, the small conscious and the large unconsciouschanges. Most of the conscious ones were much upon themodel of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can

be considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint ofmost real reformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill wasthat it did not reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusi-asm behind it, which wholly disappeared when the peoplefound themselves in front of it. It enfranchised large masses ofthe middle classes; it disfranchised very denite bodies of theworking classes; and it so struck the balance between the con-servative 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 of democracy, but because it was the beginningof the best way ever discovered of evading and postponingdemocracy. Here enters the homoeopathic treatment of revo-lution, since so oen successful. Well into the next generationDisraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer who was the symbolof the English aristocracy being no longer genuine, extendedthe franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party moveagainst his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method bywhich the old popular pressure was rst tired out and thentoned down. The politicians said the working-class was nowstrong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say itwas now weak enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent

times Payment of Members, which would once have beenregarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, waspassed quietly and without resistance, and regarded merelyas an extension of parliamentary privileges. The truth is thatthe old parliamentary oligarchy abandoned their rst line oftrenches because they had by that time constructed a secondline of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossalpolitical funds in the private and irresponsible power of thepoliticians, collected by the sale of peerages and more im-portant things, and expended on the jerrymandering of theenormously expensive elections. In the presence of this innerobstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticketwhen there is a permanent block on the line. The façade and

outward form of this new secret government is the merelymechanical application of what is called the Party System.The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of twoparties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could

be no system.

But if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform, as rep-resented by the rst Reform Bill, we can see the other side ofit in the social reform aacked immediately aer the rst Re-form Bill. It is a truth that should be a tower and a landmark,that one of the rst things done by the Reform Parliamentwas to establish those harsh and dehumanised workhouseswhich both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with

the black title of the New Bastille. This bier name lingers in

our literature, and can be found by the curious in the woof Carlyle and Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rathea note of contemporary indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the logicians and legal oratoof the parliamentary school of progress nding many poof dierentiation and even of contrast. The Bastille was ocentral institution; the workhouses have been many, andeverywhere transformed local life with whatever they hagive of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rangreat wealth were frequently sent to the Bastille; but no s

mistake has ever been made by the more business admintion of the workhouse. Over the most capricious operatioof the leres de cachet there still hovered some hazy traditidea that a man is put in prison to punish him for somethIt was the discovery of a later social science that men whnot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest most decisive dierence lies in the beer fortune of the NBastille; for no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it nevfell.

The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sethat it was the culmination and clear enunciation of a priple foreshadowed in the earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, wwas one of the many anti-popular eects of the Great PilWhen the monasteries were swept away and the mediævsystem of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars becaa problem, the solution of which has always tended towaslavery, even when the question of slavery has been clearthe irrelevant question of cruelty. It is obvious that a despate man might nd Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardiless cruel than cold weather and the bare ground — evenwere allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by a veritabnightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actupunished for sleeping under a bush on the specic and stground that he cannot aord a bed. It is obvious, howevethat he may nd his best physical good by going into the

workhouse, as he oen found it in pagan times by sellingself into slavery. The point is that the solution remains seeven when Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians ceasto be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have theluck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the Poor Law, which has so far proved permanent in our sociis that the man lost all his civic rights and lost them solelthrough poverty. There is a touch of irony, though hardlymere hypocrisy, in the fact that the Parliament which eethis reform had just been abolishing black slavery by buyout the slave-owners in the British colonies. The slave-owwere bought out at a price big enough to be called blackm

but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality

deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce representhis the real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made mane reaction against Calvinism, and was in no mean sephilanthropic. But there is something romantic in the Enmind which can always see what is remote. It is the stronexample of what men lose by being long-sighted. It is faisay that they gain many things also, the poems that are liadventures and the adventures that are like poems. It is ational savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor eviit depends on the application whether we nd a scripturfor it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abin the uermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.



52


nyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, soow that it seems stationary, was altogether in this direction,which workhouse philanthropy is the type. Nevertheless,had one national institution to combat and overcome; onestitution all the more intensely national because it was not

cial, and in a sense not even political. The modern Tradenion was the inspiration and creation of the English; it isll largely known throughout Europe by its English name.was the English expression of the European eort to resiste tendency of Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in

avery. In this it has an almost weird psychological interest,r it is a return to the past by men ignorant of the past, likee subconscious action of some man who has lost his memo- We say that history repeats itself, and it is even more inter-

ting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on earthkept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British work-an, except perhaps the British business man who employsm. Yet all who know even a lile of the Middle Ages cane that the modern Trade Union is a groping for the ancientuild. It is true that those who look to the Trade Union, anden those clear-sighted enough to call it the Guild, are oenthout the faintest tinge of mediæval mysticism, or even of

ediæval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking and

en staggering tribute to mediæval morality. It has all thenching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the mostrd-headed atheists had evolved, out of their own inner con-iousness, the notion that a number of bachelors or spinstersght to live together in celibate groups for the good of theor, or the observation of certain hours and oces, it woulda very strong point in favour of the monasteries. It wouldall the stronger if the atheists had never heard of monaster-

s; it would be strongest of all if they hated the very name ofonasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who

uts his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholiceven a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist.

he Trade Union movement passed through many perils,cluding a ludicrous aempt of certain lawyers to condemna criminal conspiracy that Trade Union solidarity, of whicheir own profession is the strongest and most startling exam-e in the world. The struggle culminated in gigantic strikeshich split the country in every direction in the earlier part ofe twentieth century. But another process, with much morewer at its back, was also in operation. The principle repre-nted by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, and ine important respect altered its course, though it can hardlysaid to have altered its object. It can most correctly be

ated by saying that the employers themselves, who alreadyganized business, began to organize social reform. It was

ore picturesquely expressed by a cynical aristocrat in Parlia-ent who said, “We are all Socialists now.” The Socialists,body of completely sincere men led by several conspicu-sly brilliant men, had long hammered into men’s heads thepeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. Thecialists proposed that the State should not merely interferebusiness but should take over the business, and pay all menequal wage-earners, or at any rate as wage-earners. The

mployers were not willing to surrender their own positionthe State, and this project has largely faded from politics.

ut the wiser of them were willing to pay beer wages, andey were specially willing to bestow various other benets song as they were bestowed aer the manner of wages. Thus

we had a series of social reforms which, for good or evil, alltended in the same direction; the permission to employeesto claim certain advantages as employees, and as somethingpermanently dierent from employers. Of these the obviousexamples were Employers’ Liability, Old Age Pensions, and,as marking another and more decisive stride in the process,the Insurance Act.

The laer in particular, and the whole plan of the socialreform in general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed thewhole English life of this period was overshadowed by Ger-

many. We had now reached, for good or evil, the nal full-ment of that gathering inuence which began to grow on us inthe seventeenth century, which was solidied by the militaryalliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the nine-teenth century had been turned into a philosophy — not to saya mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology,so that many a man’s most solemn conviction about GoodFriday was that Friday was named aer Freya. German his-tory had simply annexed English history, so that it was almostcounted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of

being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by Mahew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were,have alone produced this eect but for an external phenom-enon of great force. Our internal policy was transformed byour foreign policy; and foreign policy was dominated by themore and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now clearlythe prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend theGerman inuence in the world. Denmark was robbed of twoprovinces; France was robbed of two provinces; and thoughthe fall of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of thecapital of civilization, a thing like the sacking of Rome by theGoths, many of the most inuential people in England stillsaw nothing in it but the solid success of our kinsmen andold allies of Waterloo. The moral methods which achieved it,the juggling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgery of the

Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were butcloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered intoour ethics as well as our theology. Our view of Europe wasalso distorted and made disproportionate by the accident ofa natural concern for Constantinople and our route to India,which led Palmerston and later Premiers to support the Turkand see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynicalreaction was summed up in the strange gure of Disraeli, whomade a pro-Turkish selement full of his native indierence tothe Christian subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in thepresence of Bismarck. Disraeli was not without insight intothe inconsistencies and illusions of the English; he said manysagacious things about them, and one especially when he told

the Manchester School that their moo was “Peace and Plenty,amid a starving people, and with the world in arms.” Butwhat he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodiedas a comment on what he himself said about Peace with Hon-our. Returning from that Berlin Conference he should havesaid, “I bring you Peace with Honour; peace with the seeds ofthe most horrible war of history; and honour as the dupes andvictims of the old bully in Berlin.”

But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform thatGermany was believed to be leading the way, and to havefound the secret of dealing with the economic evil. In the caseof Insurance, which was the test case, she was applauded for

obliging all her workmen to set apart a portion of their wages



53

the r eturn of the BarBarIan

for any time of sickness; and numerous other provisions, bothin Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which wasthat of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhereinvolved an external power having a nger in the family pie;

but lile aention was paid to any friction thus caused, forall prejudices against the process were supposed to be thegrowth of ignorance. And that ignorance was already beingaacked by what was called education — an enterprise alsoinspired largely by the example, and partly by the commercialcompetition of Germany. It was pointed out that in Germany

governments and great employers thought it well worth theirwhile to apply the grandest scale of organization and the mi-nutest inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole Ger-man race. The government was the stronger for training itsscholars as it trained its soldiers; the big businesses were thestronger for manufacturing mind as they manufactured mate-rial. English education was made compulsory; it was madefree; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men labouredto create a ladder of standards and examinations, whichwould connect the cleverest of the poor with the culture ofthe English universities and the current teaching in historyor philosophy. But it cannot be said that the connection wasvery complete, or the achievement so thorough as the Ger-

man achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishmanremained in many things much as his fathers had been, andseemed to think the Higher Criticism too high for him even tocriticize.

And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked Godthat we had failed. Education, if it had ever really been inquestion, would doubtless have been a noble gi; educationin the sense of the central tradition of history, with its free-dom, its family honour, its chivalry which is the ower ofChristendom. But what would our populace, in our epoch,have actually learned if they had learned all that our schoolsand universities had to teach? That England was but a lile

branch on a large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritualsympathy, all-encircling like the sea, had always made us thenatural allies of the great folk by the owing Rhine; that alllight came from Luther and Lutheran Germany, whose sciencewas still purging Christianity of its Greek and Roman accre-tions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow; that Francewas a dung-heap fated to decay — a dung-heap with a crow-ing cock on it. What would the ladder of education have ledto, except a platform on which a posturing professor provedthat a cousin german was the same as a German cousin? Whatwould the guersnipe have learnt as a graduate, except toembrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had

other things to learn. And he was quicker than his educatedcountrymen, for he had nothing to unlearn.

He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, andstepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out

before men’s eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benets of his organization; then we beheld under a liingdaybreak what light we had followed and aer what imagewe had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story ofmankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things socatastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowdof poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knewthat they were Englishmen, burst through the lthy cobwebs

of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood

when they knew that they were Christian men. The Englpoor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, londespoiled of property, and now being despoiled of libertyentered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the worAnd when the critic of politics and literature, feeling thatwar is aer all heroic, looks around him to nd the hero,can point to nothing but a mob.



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XVIII

Conclusion

so small a book on so large a maer, nished hastilyough amid the necessities of an enormous national crisis,would be absurd to pretend to have achieved proportion;

ut I will confess to some aempt to correct a disproportion.e talk of historical perspective, but I rather fancy there is toouch perspective in history; for perspective makes a giant agmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant foreshortenedth his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of clay.e see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, evenhen we admire its colours; and the study of a man like Na-leon is too oen that of “The Last Phase.” So there is a spiritat thinks it reasonable to deal in detail with Old Sarum,d would think it ridiculous to deal in detail with the UseSarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a goldenonument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected tofred. English history is misread especially, I think, because

e crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of theuarts; and many of the memorials of our past seem to suf-r from the same visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. Butough the story of the Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it wasso an epilogue.

make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change reallyme with the fall of Richard II., following on his failure toe mediæval despotism in the interests of mediæval democ-cy. England, like the other nations of Christendom, haden created not so much by the death of the ancient civi-ation as by its escape from death, or by its refusal to die.ediæval civilization had arisen out of the resistance to the

rbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and theore subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liber-s and local government under kings who controlled theder things of war and taxation; and in the peasant war ofe fourteenth century in England, the king and the populaceme for a moment into conscious alliance. They both foundat a third thing was already too strong for them. That thirding was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself therliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, hadimarily consisted of plain men summoned by the King likerymen; but it soon became a very special jury. It became,r good or evil, a great organ of government, surviving thehurch, the monarchy and the mob; it did many great and not

ew good things. It created what we call the British Empire;created something which was really far more valuable, aw and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even

umanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. Itd sucient sense of the instincts of the people at least until

now inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whetherI asked it or no, is whether it did not rather take the side of

barbarism against civilization.

At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of thesethings, we have returned to an origin and we are back in thewar with the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that theEnglishman and the Frenchman should be on the same side asthat Alfred and Abbo should be on the same side, in that blackcentury when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besiegedParis. But there are now, perhaps, less certain tests of the spiri-

tual as distinct from the material victory of civilization. Ideasare more mixed, are complicated by ne shades or covered byne names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behindhim the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myselfshould judge primarily by one political and moral test. Thesoul of savagery is slavery. Under all its mask of machineryand instruction, the German regimentation of the poor wasthe relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape fromit for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only

by doing what the mediævals did aer the other barbariandefeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups,gradually to restore the personal property of the poor andthe personal freedom of the family. If the English really at-tempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to anyone who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage andcapacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will.If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with thedead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt fromGermany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, thediscoverer of this great sociological dri, has called the ServileState. And there are moods in which a man, considering thatconclusion of our story, is half inclined to wish that the waveof Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies to-gether; and that the world should never know anything moreof the last of the English, except that they died for liberty.

T E

short story of britain

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