they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local
taxation, called "two burgesses" from every town. If we had read a
little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole
secret of the lost mediaeval civilization. We had only to ask what
burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately
have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of
which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder
that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title
of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective
corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the
explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that the
Parliament was the one among these mediaeval creations which ultimately
consented to betray and to destroy the rest.
IX
NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS
If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom was
and is one culture, or one civilization, there is a rough but plain way
of putting it. It is by asking what is the most common, or rather the
most commonplace, of all the uses of the word "Christian." There is, of
course, the highest use of all; but it has nowadays many other uses.
Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more
recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a
modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it
has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and it
means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not
actually say to Jim Hawkins, "I feel myself out of touch with a certain
type of civilization"; but he did say, "I haven't tasted Christian
food." The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and
trousers do not indeed say, "We perceive a divergence between her
culture and our own"; but they do say, "Why can't she dress like a
Christian?" That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and
even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a
very real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localized
thing, especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism the
Christian faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessive
and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint,
and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By a
process it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangement
between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners did
not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schism
came, to doubt if they were Christians.
There was, indeed, much more than this involved. While the internal
structure of mediaevalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in the
greater affairs, and especially the external affairs, such as peace and
war, most (though by no means all) of what was mediaeval was monarchical.
To see what the kings came to mean we must glance back at the great
background, as of darkness and daybreak, against which the first figures
of our history have already appeared. That background was the war with
the barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only one nation but
more like one city--and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall or
Paris one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have
chronicled the siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What
followed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Ages
and the dawn of mediaevalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism.
And it is the paradox of the Crusades that though the Saracen was
superficially more civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinct
which saw him also to be in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of
northern heathenry the civilization spread with a simplier progress. But
it was not till the end of the Middle Ages, and close on the
Reformation, that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyond
Germany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if he permitted
himself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be inclined
to suggest that for some reason it didn't "take" even then.
The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in the
case of Islam the alien power which could not be crushed was evidently
curbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. As
these fears faded the princes of Europe, who had come together to face
them, were left facing each other. They had more leisure to find that
their own captaincies clashed; but this would easily have been
overruled, or would have produced a petty riot, had not the true
creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in the local life, tended
to real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almost
without knowing it; and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree or
a title-deed found he spoke for the forests and the songs of a whole
country-side. In England especially the transition is typified in the
accident which raised to the throne one of the noblest men of the Middle
Ages.
Edward I. came clad in all the splendours of his epoch. He had taken the
Cross and fought the Saracens; he had been the only worthy foe of Simon
de Montfort in those baronial wars which, as we have seen, were the
first sign (however faint) of a serious theory that England should be
ruled by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de
Montfort, and more solidly, to develop the great mediaeval institution of
a parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed on the existing
parish democracies, and was first merely the summoning of local
representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed its rise was one
with the rise of what we now call taxation; and there is thus a thread
of theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing.
But in the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings,
and notably an instrument of Edward I. He often quarrelled with his
parliaments and may sometimes have displeased his people (which has
never been at all the same thing), but on the whole he was supremely the
representative sovereign. In this connection one curious and difficult
question may be considered here, though it marks the end of a story
that began with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty certain that he was
never more truly a representative king, one might say a republican king,
than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem is so much
misunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupid spite against a gifted
and historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it.
The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular.
They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready
for use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful; it is
certain that in this way they were used. It is also quite fair to say
that in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage was not indeed that
suggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on the one idea
that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story about
King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was a
story against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted
on as exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviously
regarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews' position
was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized
people. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and
even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as
the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only be
accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced
as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the
fury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real
case for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed.
Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with at
least equal reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that _mutual_ charge
of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It is certain that in
popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused as
uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse
on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who wept
when she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the
rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth,
flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw
him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of his
people.
Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far
from false. He was the most just and conscientious type of mediaeval
monarch; and it is exactly this fact that brings into relief the new
force which was to cross his path and in strife with which he died.
While he was just, he was also eminently legal. And it must be
remembered, if we would not merely read back ourselves into the past,
that much of the dispute of the time was legal; the adjustment of
dynastic and feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. In
this spirit Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to the
Scottish crown; and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated quite
honestly. But his legal, or, as some would say, pedantic mind made the
proviso that the Scottish king as such was already under his suzerainty,
and he probably never understood the spirit he called up against him;
for that spirit had as yet no name. We call it to-day Nationalism.
Scotland resisted; and the adventures of an outlawed knight named
Wallace soon furnished it with one of those legends which are more
important than history. In a way that was then at least equally
practical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially the
patriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remained even
throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed; but the
heather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new national cause
by one of Edward's own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king a
mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of a
new invasion upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words the
great king commanded that his bones should be borne in front of the
battle; and the bones, which were of gigantic size, were eventually
buried with the epitaph, "Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer
of the Scots." It was a true epitaph, but in a sense exactly opposite to
its intention. He was their hammer, but he did not break but make them;
for he smote them on an anvil and he forged them into a sword.
That coincidence or course of events, which must often be remarked in
this story, by which (for whatever reason) our most powerful kings did
not somehow leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign,
when the baronial quarrels were resumed and the northern kingdom, under
Bruce, cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise
the reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that we
find the new national tendency yet further developed. The great French
wars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III.,
and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition of
the time we must first realize that the third Edward made as strictly
legal and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward had made to
Scotland; the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equally
conventional in form. He thought, or said, he had a claim on a kingdom
as a squire might say he had a claim on an estate; superficially it was
an affair for the English and French lawyers. To read into this that the
people were sheep bought and sold is to misunderstand all mediaeval
history; sheep have no trade union. The English arms owed much of their
force to the class of the free yeomen; and the success of the infantry,
especially of the archery, largely stood for that popular element which
had already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Courtrai. But the point
is this; that while the lawyers were talking about the Salic Law, the
soldiers, who would once have been talking about guild law or glebe
law, were already talking about English law and French law. The French
were first in this tendency to see something outside the township, the
trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The whole
history of the change can be seen in the fact that the French had early
begun to call the nation the Greater Land. France was the first of
nations and has remained the norm of nations, the only one which is a
nation and nothing else. But in the collision the English grew equally
corporate; and a true patriotic applause probably hailed the victories
of Crecy and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory of
Agincourt. The latter did not indeed occur until after an interval of
internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a later
page; but as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars were
continuous. And the English tradition that followed after Agincourt was
continuous also. It is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before the
great Elizabethans. The Henry 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 whole
adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry
into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, and
not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of
the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the
Englishman of the Middle Ages. 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 contemporary
impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only
expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle that
they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descended
to the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day,
had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the
modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lost
the gaiety and kept only the humour. But in that early April of
patriotism the new unity of the State still sat lightly upon them; and a
cobbler in Henry's army, who would at home have thought first that it
was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well as
sincerely have hailed the splintering of the French lances in a storm of
arrows, and cried, "St. George for Merry England."
Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of
patriotism it was the Autumn of mediaeval society. In the next chapter I
shall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization;
and even here, after the first victories, it is necessary to insist on
the bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more in
the later stages, as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the
time far less happy than England--wasted by the treason of its nobles
and the weakness of its kings almost as much as by the invasion of the
islanders. And yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed
at last to rend the sky, and let in the light of what it is hard for the
coldest historian to call anything but a miracle.
It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalism
eternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult to
be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change
which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great
thing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptized into a promise,
or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas
was, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this
kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contract
into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for
the most secular types of our own time their relation to their native
land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags
are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it
for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a
fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern
humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it
had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no
sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not
do exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strange
development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring.
It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it
if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be
unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is
the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The
recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized
reality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in
sickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in national
disgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a
passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.
It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in
which a clearance in the earth and sky, above the confusion and
abasement of the crowns, showed the commanding figure of a woman of the
people. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French Revolution. She
was the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in the
French knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw something
above her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the life
of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the new
national sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for
a defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herself
ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I
spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It
is more appropriate in this place to consider the ultimate reaction of
this sacrifice upon the romance and the realities of England.
I have never counted it a patriotic part to plaster my own country 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 in the wrong, has yet been ultimately linked up with
a curious quality in which she is rather unusually in the right. No one
candidly comparing us with other countries can say we have specially
failed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stoned, or even the
prophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at least a
loose large-mindedness which always finally falls into the praise not
only of great foreigners but great foes. Often along with much injustice
it has an illogical generosity; and while it will dismiss a great people
with mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty
hero-worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, for
our books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they
afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had.
Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going into
war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was
more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if
anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a mediaevalism
of hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, could
weep with compassion; and it is probable enough that Wallace wept, with
or without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her romance was a reality,
the reality of nationalism; and she knew much more about the Scottish
patriots ages before her time than Thackeray did about the Irish
patriots immediately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but in
that matter he was a very small man, and indeed an invisible one. The
cases of Wallace and Washington and many others are here only mentioned,
however, to suggest an eccentric magnanimity which surely balances some
of our prejudices. We have done many foolish things, but we have at
least done one fine thing; we have whitewashed our worst enemies. If we
have done this for a bold Scottish raider and a vigorous Virginian
slave-holder, it may at least show that we are not likely to fail in our
final appreciation of the one white figure in the motley processions of
war. I believe there to be in modern England something like a universal
enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic write a
book about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely
in order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not
believe there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of being
an Englishman then, would not discard his chance of riding as the
crowned conqueror at the head of all the spears of Agincourt, if he
could be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells that he
broke his spear asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc.
X
THE WAR OF THE USURPERS
The poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats,
Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was
Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more
clearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of kings to
govern wrong." It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I
do not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of
the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal
of "non-resistance" to any national and legitimate power; though I
cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more
modern ideal of "non-resistance" even to a foreign and lawless power.
But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; and
the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equally
religious but much more realistic; and though tangled with many other
and even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the
changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated
better than by taking Pope's easy epigram and pointing out that it is,
after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right divine of kings to
govern wrong," considered as a sneer, really evades all that we mean by
"a right." To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be
right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right is
what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a
right to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to
choose his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to
express the opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate
to make the controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be
right.
Now mediaeval monarchy, though only one aspect of mediaeval rule, was
roughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a
voter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed
horribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as
a private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he
goes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so
simple as this; for the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion
to fancy, under a single and steely discipline. They were very
controversial and therefore very complex; and it is easy, by isolating
items whether about _jus divinum_ or _primus inter pares_, to maintain
that the mediaevals were almost anything; it has been seriously
maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the influence
of the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen,
encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which was
meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man
tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The
precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is,
not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.