and therefore more logical view of their own function; for the note of
their nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I. was a Scot and a
pedant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I. also was not a
little of a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had also the virtues
of a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for the
things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un-English, and
could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, and
seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more
inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of the
sort that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore
remembered--especially the black. From the first he fenced with his
Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner.
The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman
who wished to finish the chapter in order to find out what happened to
Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt
to make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and perished on the
scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of
the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first
carried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the
Parliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience
and genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the same death as his great
servant.
Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, through ramifications
generally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the
great modern query of whether a King can raise taxes without the consent
of his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the great
Buckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax which
Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators
always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires
made a legend of the mediaeval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a
true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have
already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths
cover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very
different certainty, and should be considered separately.
For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of the
facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that
the seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is not
possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn
of the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic and
actively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I. to raise
Ship Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II.
to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals from
Charles I. was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from
the village communities. It was the same institution which only two
generations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of
popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular
utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and
trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly
had, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusively
the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House of
Commons has itself been a House of Lords.
But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign
against the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss
and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are said
against the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies is
little realized; for it is connected with what our insular history most
neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered that
though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that
succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the
Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart
Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the
spread of a conflagration. Charles II., for instance, was a man of
strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was
quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a
philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost
awful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It
was more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than
the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of
rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English
safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was
_lettre de cachet_ as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the
law were better off than the French; a French satirist would probably
have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse
off than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was with the
squire; but he was, if anything, more limited when he was the
magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually
weaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, in
short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were
in a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some remains
of mediaeval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild.
Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements,
which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such things
might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes
was a single monster and for France a single man.
As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism
was pure, it was unfortunately passing. And the very type of the
transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who
is popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in
history much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism.
He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his
life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as he
emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism of
the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of
the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less of
the Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy
became at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised
and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity,
toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to
the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy
in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without
absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires,
a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not
without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an
impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very
unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his,
and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the
high inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had
to compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather
than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with
bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness
regarded as beasts--or as the modern euphemism would put it, as
aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human
slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a
sort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not a
representative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was
rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or
vision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision
between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century
movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when
the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into
the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell
said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own God
who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as
overpowering as a nightmare--and as passing.
It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day; it
was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even what
followed Cromwell's death, the Restoration, was an aristocratic
compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for a
mediaeval king; but the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of a
piece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things where
there seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus the
Puritan regime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to
mediaevalism--militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but
highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans
became masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories
and Whigs; but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in
the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years' War. A discovery
is an incurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowd could
be turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds.
Similarly the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans; but
they had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the
Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from the
vegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanished
almost like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armed
valour and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It
was the final break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, and
perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal
symbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed they
tried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in
the very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage things they
invoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what is
called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest
Jew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning from
an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed
disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than the
nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work.
They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy;
and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very
sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they were
ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very
secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of
them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the
sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western
shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the
whole story of Britain.
XIV
THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS
Whether or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can
be little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles II.
was never in the old sense a King; he was a Leader of the Opposition to
his own Ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept his
official post, and because his brother and successor was an incredibly
stupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one of
the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II. was fitted for the
more modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth-century
than a seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in a
comedy; and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not of
Shakespeare. He was more modern yet when he enjoyed the pure
experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys
that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and his
brother, however, had two links with what was in England the losing
side; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The
first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, of
course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it
neared the next century, was their tie with the French Monarchy. We will
deal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much more
irreligious age; but the truth about it is tangled and far from easy to
trace.
The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had
ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities
that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type
and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that
priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught
talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very
variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great
degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic
continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism,
there can be no doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late
as the Civil War, was stuffed with "superstitions" which were Catholic
in the extreme sense we should now call Continental. Yet many similar
parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of
Continental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ, but as
the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now to
guess the proportion of Protestantism; but there is no doubt about its
presence, especially its presence in centres of importance like London.
By the time of Charles II., after the purge of the Puritan Terror, it
had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere
exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. The
Monmouth rebellion showed that it had a popular, though an
insufficiently popular, backing. The "No Popery" force became the crowd
if it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urban
crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion with
which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to-day. One of
these scares and scoops (not to add the less technical name of lies) was
the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the
Tale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm that
finally swept away James II.
The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those
illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament
is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs
from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an
institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but
about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only
cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it
because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the
English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of
common people loved the Church of England without having even decided
what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval
Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility
which clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely
different purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an
Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenth
century. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was but
the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the
Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was
treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, many
entertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility.
In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a
fashion that was emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When,
therefore, James II. seemed to menace this practising communion, he
aroused something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of
the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I mean
the fact that the influence then called Popish was then in a real sense
regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely a
conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about
abstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract speculations
of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things
undreamed of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thus
to many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-century
Englishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were the
Quakers; and the cosy English compromise shuddered when the two things
shook hands. For it was something much more than a Stuart intrigue which
made these philosophical extremes meet, merely because they were
philosophical; and which brought the weary but humorous mind of Charles
II. into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.
Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of
toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and
therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more
intelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to
this affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (in
what proportion we know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almost
maniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, been
turned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends of
priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the
English persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at
least by this time the English, like the French, persecutors were
oppressing a minority. Unfortunately there was another province of
government in which they were still more madly persecuting the
majority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on its
terrific character that lingering crime that was called the government
of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network of
unnatural laws by which that country was covered till towards the end of
the eighteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitude
to the Irish was tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion of
the Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remembered for ever. James
II., fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventually
found refuge in Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The Prince of
Orange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in that
country with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, but
saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the military
genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace could
only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish,
in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Government
occupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter
on which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that
the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the
English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it
incessantly for ever.
But here again the Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the side
of secular policy, and especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats to
whom power passed finally at the Revolution were already ceasing to have
any supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they
had a very natural faith in England as against France; and even, in a
certain sense, in English institutions as against French institutions.
And just as these men, the most unmediaeval of mankind, could yet boast
about some mediaeval liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury,
so they could appeal to a true mediaeval legend in the matter of a war
with France. A typical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole
could complain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him with
traces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when he was looking
for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the _naivete_
of scepticism, and never dream how far away from John of Gaunt he was
really wandering in saying so. But though their notion of mediaeval
history was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting the
French could still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black
Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter, in short, it
is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as patriots will
always be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were themselves far
from unpatriotic; and James II. in particular may well be called the
founder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France,
among other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder
before and the younger after his period of rule; and France aided the
later Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for the new England,
especially the new English nobility, France was the enemy.
The transformation through which the external relations of England
passed at the end of the seventeenth century is symbolized by two very
separate and definite steps; the first the accession of a Dutch king and
the second the accession of a German king. In the first were present all
the features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In the
second we have the condition in which even those effecting it can hardly
call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like
a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign gun indeed, and one
fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel in
which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play a
great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a hole
in the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they
were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as
he was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He
was in private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared what
George was except that he was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly
republican magistrate of what had once been a purely republican
experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth
century. George was when he was at home pretty much what the King of
the Cannibal Islands was when he was at home--a savage personal ruler
scarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of
acute if narrow intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above
all, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to a
Stuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was a
familiar figure, and already a part of our royal family. With George
there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there
before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence writing,
except as one mentions a Hottentot--the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.
The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these two
foreign kings, is therefore the true time of transition. It is the
bridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enough
to call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strong
enough deliberately to call in a weak man who would allow them to help
themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too
much; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two great
figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear
about their own aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at every
point. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other was
John Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story
of Churchill is primarily the story of the Revolution and how it
succeeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story of the
Counter-Revolution and how it failed.