that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. "_Roi ne puis_"; the
royal power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one
respect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional
moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same
vices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most
emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very
markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do
not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that
tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the
lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no more
expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star.
But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own
mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own
reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to
England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, was
the fall of Richard II.
Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical;
they are traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though
the memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II.
incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial
ambition which ultimately broke up the old mediaeval order. But divine
right had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the
Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the
thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which is
the main thing to be studied in later mediaevalism. Richard himself was
possibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might well be the weak
link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There may
have been a real case against the _coup d'etat_ which he effected in
1397, and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sections
of disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the first
true usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand that
larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back at
something which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. It
was certainly the greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly the
greatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this
book. The real English people, the men who work with their hands, lifted
their hands to strike their masters, probably for the first and
certainly for the last time in history.
Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as by
developing into something better. In one sense it did not die, but
rather came to life. The slave-owner was like a man who should set up a
row of sticks for a fence, and then find 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 difference between a
stick and a tree was precisely the difference between a slave and a
serf--or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly tending to
become. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a social
evolution, and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it
was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the
emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it had
not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was
"unwritten," like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary,
not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, who
now drive their great coaches through Acts of Parliament. The new
peasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn it by one of those
turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the common sense of
unwritten constitutions. The French Wars gradually grew to be almost as
much of a scourge to England as they were to France. England was
despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the
extremes of society; and, by a process more proper to an ensuing
chapter, the balance of the better mediaevalism was lost. Finally, a
furious plague, called the Black Death, burst like a blast on the land,
thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin.
There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of getting luxuries; and
the great lords did what one would expect them to do. They became
lawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. They appealed to a rule
already nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more direct
servitude of the Dark Ages. They announced their decision to the people,
and the people rose in arms.
The two dramatic stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubtfully with the
beginning, and definitely with the end of the revolt, are far from
unimportant, despite the desire of our present prosaic historians to
pretend that all dramatic stories are unimportant. The tale of Tyler's
first blow is significant in the sense that it is not only dramatic but
domestic. It avenged an insult to the family, and made the legend of the
whole riot, whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstration
on behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of the poor is
almost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspector need only bring a
printed form and a few long words to do the same thing without having
his head broken. The occasion of the protest, and the form which the
feudal reaction had first taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but a
part of a general process of pressing the population to servile labour,
which fully explains the ferocious language held by the government after
the rising had failed; the language in which it threatened to make the
state of the serf more servile than before. The facts attending the
failure in question are less in dispute. The mediaeval populace showed
considerable military energy and co-operation, stormed its way to
London, and was met outside the city by a company containing the King
and the Lord Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. The
treacherous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the signal for battle
and massacre on the spot. The peasants closed in roaring, "They have
killed our leader"; when a strange thing happened; something which gives
us a fleeting and a final glimpse 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 have rung out to
that multitude almost like the voice of a child. But the power of his
fathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in some
strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, he
cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them all
they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the
breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are
not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend
of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to
be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and
Parliament almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people.
For when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were
betrayed, the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament, the
Parliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is not merely 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, first summoned by the king like juries and many
other things, to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence about
taxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore,
an aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to the
knife, between the Commons with a large C and the commons with a small
one. Talking about the knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tyler
was not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantile
oligarchy of London; though there is probably no truth in the tale that
his blood-stained dagger figures on the arms of the City of London. The
mediaeval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, but not of
sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of the cross of their
Redeemer, in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St.
Paul.
It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being an
object of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but if
ever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess that juries are
no longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept in mind, as against the
opposite idea of the _jus divinum_ or fixed authority, if we would
appreciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which dethroned him was a
rebellion, it was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that had
just proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion of the
people. But this is not the main point. The point is that by the removal
of Richard, a step above the parliament became possible for the first
time. The transition was tremendous; the crown became an object of
ambition. That which one could snatch another could snatch from him;
that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the House of York
could take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable thing seated
out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations adventurers
strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above which was
something new in the mediaeval imagination; an empty throne.
It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largely
because he was a usurper, is the clue to many things, some of which we
should now call good, some bad, all of which we should probably call
good or bad with the excessive facility with which we dismiss distant
things. It led the Lancastrian House to lean on Parliament, which was
the mixed matter we have already seen. It may have been in some ways
good for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged by an institution
which at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom of
speech. It was almost certainly bad for the parliament, making it yet
more the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of which we shall see much
later. It also led the Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which
was perhaps more popular; to make English the tongue of the court for
the first time, and to reopen the French wars with the fine flag-waving
of Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rather, perhaps,
on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect of
clericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end of
mediaevalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the
last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of these
heresies will lend little support to the notion that they were in
themselves prophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybody
can call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius a
Protestant; and if John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer.
But though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning of
English Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hint at the end of English
Catholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on to
Nonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch, and put it to his
own church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old
religious system, and which afterwards became a true national tradition
against Mary, was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these
fifteenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and a
defensible philosophy, but with some of these men persecution was rather
a perversion. Across the channel, one of them was presiding at the trial
of Joan of Arc.
But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch
that follows the fall of Richard II., and especially in those feuds that
found so ironic an imagery in English roses--and thorns. The
foreshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to
be, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and
Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and
revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlike
widow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes
exaggeratively implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion and
the unicorn) merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral
difference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroic
time. But when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the
new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops, and
York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king who
permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have said
everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by
counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But
this truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called
Tory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a
justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the
fighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.
If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the
Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry,
there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course,
scarcely a line of him was like the caricature with which his much
meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even a
hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably
the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and
sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as the
crooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre
shedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as
much as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered
nephews is not certain, and is told by those who also tell us he was
born with tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimson
cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted is the very
air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable even
of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was a
good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet we
think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He
anticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music,
and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity. He
did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only
pleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he was
nervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a fine
contemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on this
particular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, a
ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who would
also fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, we can
study all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon his name;
an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The face
has a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on the
face that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is
death; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the
death of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St.
Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First
Crusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards,
wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the
crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one grace
among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die.
But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester,
there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the
mediaeval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as
he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth--treason.
For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as
treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When
his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new
political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless
servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he
challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of
Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The
modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for
since that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Having
slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. So
ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the
usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere,
found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.
XI
THE REBELLION OF THE RICH
Sir Thomas More, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes
in which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as a
hero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a more rational daylight
which for so many made mediaevalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we
think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no dispute
about his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all things a
Humanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern,
which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he
was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or
rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity
of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancy
attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopian
notions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions mark what
(for want of a better word) we can only call his modernism. Thus the
immortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savours of
evolution; and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriage
might be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He suggested
a sort of pacifism--though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving
it. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of
mediaeval abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism would be too
narrow rather than too broad for him. If he was obviously not a
Protestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him the name of a
Reformer. But he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern
minds than theology; he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pagan. His
friend Colet summed up that escape from mediaevalism which might be
called the passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern
debates they are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growth of
this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog-Latin. It
would be nearer the truth to call the mediaevals bi-lingual than to call
their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a
possession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say that
he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this
Greek spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its
balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that
he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably
infected the splendid intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle
Ages; we can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense of
barbaric, or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet
of "Chevy Chase." The wealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit,
loveliness, and civic heroism, had so recently been revealed to that
generation in its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seem
a trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of the
Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eyes of More
we are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over an
English landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the level
light of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of the
Renascence; England passing from the mediaeval to the modern. Thus he
looked forth, and saw many things and said many things; they were all
worthy and many witty; but he noted one thing which is at once a
horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over that
landscape said: "Sheep are eating men."
This singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation and
enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such very curt
historical accounts of it. It has nothing to do with the translation of
the Bible, or the character of Henry VIII., or the characters of Henry
VIII.'s wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther and
the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant men, or
_vice versa_; nor did Henry, at any period of his own brief and rather
bewildering papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had them
eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by this picturesque
expression, was that an intensive type of agriculture was giving way to
a very extensive type of pasture. Great spaces of England which had
hitherto been cut up into the commonwealth of a number of farmers were
being laid under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has
been put, by a touch of epigram rather in the manner of More himself, by
Mr. J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think, only to be found in
the back files of _The New Witness_. He enunciated the paradox that the
very much admired individual, who made two blades of grass grow instead
of one, was a murderer. In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the true
moral origins of this movement, which led to the growing of so much
grass and the murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so much
humanity. He traced it, and every true record of that transformation
traces it, to the growth of a new refinement, in a sense a more rational
refinement, in the governing class. The mediaeval lord had been, by
comparison, a coarse fellow; he had merely lived in the largest kind of
farm-house after the fashion of the largest kind of farmer. He drank
wine when he could, but he was quite ready to drink ale; and science had
not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than this, one
of the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she cannot
come to him because her carriage horses are pulling the plough. In the
true Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered, but
in the time of Henry VIII. the transformation was beginning. In the next
generation a phrase was common which is one of the keys of the time, and
is very much the key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. This
or that great lord was said to be "Italianate." It meant subtler shapes
of beauty, delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver not treated as
barbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal,
mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty; it meant the
perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular Gothic craftsmanship,
the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things: rather it
was the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscious art
especially into unnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul.
We must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is an
explanation--and an excuse.