Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 63148-h.htm or 63148-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/63148/pg63148-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63148/63148-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/menwhohavemadeem00grifiala
Transcriber’s note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).
MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE
* * * * * *
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
=VALDAR, THE OFT-BORN. A Saga of Seven Ages.= Imp.
16mo, cloth gilt. Illustrated by HAROLD PIFFARD.
Price 6s.
=THE VIRGIN OF THE SUN. A Tale of the Conquest of
Peru.= Crown 8vo, cloth. With Frontispiece by STANLEY
L. WOOD. Price 6s.
=KNAVES OF DIAMONDS. Being Tales of the Diamond
Fields.= Crown 8vo, cloth. Illustrated by E. F.
SHERIE. Price 3s. 6d.
LONDON
C. ARTHUR PEARSON LIMITED
* * * * * *
[Illustration: “ALMIGHTY GOD, OF THY GOODNESS, GIVE ME LIFE AND LEAVE
ONCE TO SAIL AN ENGLISH SHIP ON YONDER SEA!”
(_See page 54._) _Frontispiece._]
MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE
by
GEORGE GRIFFITH
Third Edition
London
C. Arthur Pearson Limited
Henrietta Street, W.C.
1899
To
THE GLORIOUS MEMORY
OF
THE MIGHTY DEAD
AND TO
THE HONOUR OF THE LIVING
WHO ARE
CARRYING ON THEIR NOBLE WORK,
THE FOLLOWING PAGES
ARE INSCRIBED.
“_Fair is our lot--O goodly is our heritage!
(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!)
For the Lord our God Most High
He hath made the deep as dry,
He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth!_”
A SONG OF THE ENGLISH
CONTENTS
I.
PAGE
WILLIAM THE NORMAN 1
II.
EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS 21
III.
THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE 39
IV.
OLIVER CROMWELL 71
V.
WILLIAM OF ORANGE 97
VI.
JAMES COOK 119
VII.
LORD CLIVE 143
VIII.
WARREN HASTINGS 169
IX.
NELSON 193
X.
WELLINGTON 223
XI.
“CHINESE GORDON” 249
XII.
CECIL RHODES 279
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BY STANLEY L. WOOD
“ALMIGHTY GOD, OF THY GOODNESS, GIVE ME LIFE AND
LEAVE ONCE TO SAIL AN ENGLISH SHIP ON YONDER
SEA!” _Frontispiece_
_Facing p._
HE DROVE THE GOOD STEEL THROUGH MAIL AND FLESH AND BONE 10
DUKE WILLIAM ROARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE 17
EDWARD GRIPPED THE WOULD-BE MURDERER 30
THEY CARRIED HIM DOWN TO THE BOATS 53
HE SWOOPED WITH HIS CAVALRY ROUND THE REAR OF THE KING’S ARMY 83
HE HALTED HIS ARMY ... AND SANG THE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENTH
PSALM 94
MADE HIM REEL IN HIS SADDLE 112
“MEN OF ENNISKILLEN, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR ME?” HE CRIED 113
MISSED HIM AND KILLED ANOTHER MAN BEHIND HIM 141
INSTEAD OF CHARGING THEY TURNED ROUND AND MADE LANES THROUGH
THE ARMY BEHIND THEM 158
HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE 185
NELSON AT COPENHAGEN 214
THE ORDER THAT SENT THE BRITISH LINE STREAMING DOWN FROM THE
RISING GROUND 246
THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS OF KHARTOUM 275
THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS 300
FOREWORD
The Epic of England has yet to be written. It may be that the fulness
of time for writing it has not come yet, or it may be that Britain is
still waiting for her Homer and her Virgil. Perhaps the matured genius
of a Rudyard Kipling, that strong, sweet Singer of the Seven Seas, may
some day address itself to the accomplishment of this most splendid of
all possible tasks, and then, again, it may be that it is his only to
sound the prelude. That is a matter for the gods to decide in their
own good time, but this much is certain--that when this work has been
worthily done the world will hear echoing through the ages such a
thunder-song as has never stirred human hearts before.
It will begin, doubtless, with the battle-cries of the old Sea-Kings of
the North, chanted to the music of their churning oars and the rush and
roar of the foam swirling away under the bows of their longships, and
from them it will go on ringing and thundering through the centuries,
ever swelling in depth and volume as more and more of the races of men
hear it rolling over the battle-fields of conquered lands, until at
last--as every loyal man of English speech must truly hope--the roar
of the Last Battle has rolled away into eternal silence, and north and
south, east and west, the proclaiming of the Pax Britannica heralds the
epoch of
“The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.”
But in the meantime, while we are waiting for the coming of the singer
whose master-hand shall blend the song and story of Britain into
an epic worthy of his magnificent theme, materials may be gathered
together, old facts may be presented in new lights, and the great
characters who have played their parts in the most tremendous drama
that has ever occupied the Stage of Time may be re-grouped in such
fashion as will make their subtler relationships more plain, and all
this will make the great work readier to the hand of the Master when he
comes.
It is a portion of this minor work that I have set myself here to do.
The making of a nation and the building of nations up into empires
is, humanly speaking, the greatest and noblest work that human hands
and brains can find to do, for the making of an empire means, in its
ultimate analysis, the substitution of order for anarchy, of commerce
for plunder, of civilisation for savagery--in a word, of peace for
strife.
Now, the British Empire as it stands to-day is unquestionably the
greatest moral and material Fact in human history, and hence it is
permissible to assume that the makers of it must, each in his own way,
whether of peace or war, have been the greatest empire-builders the
world has yet seen, and it is my purpose here to take the greatest of
these and tell with such force and vividness as I may, the story of
the man and his work. I am not going to write a series of biographies
arranged in prim chronological ranks, nor am I going to confine myself
to the narration of collated facts so dear to the hearts of educational
inspectors and scholastic examiners. Such you will find already cut and
dried for you in the school-books and in many ponderous tomes, from the
reading of which may your good taste and good sense deliver you!
I shall seek rather to show you the living man doing the living work
which his destiny called him to do. The man will not always be found
of the best, nor the work, seemingly, of the noblest, but what I shall
seek to show you is that the work _had_ to be done in order that a
certain end might be accomplished, and that the man who did it was, all
things considered, the best and, it may be, the only man to do it. In
so far as I do not do this I shall have failed in the doing of my own
work.
One more word seems necessary in order to anticipate certain possible
misconceptions. Our empire-making is not yet complete, even at home.
The centuries of strife during which the hammering and welding
together of the nations which now make up the United Kingdom has been
progressing have naturally and necessarily left certain national
jealousies and antipathies behind them, and the last thing that I
should desire would be to arouse any of these.
There are two kinds of patriotism, a smaller and a greater, a National
and an Imperial. Both are equally good and noble, and it is necessary
that the first should precede the second. But it is equally necessary
that it should not supersede or obscure it, and it is to this later
and greater, this Imperial patriotism that I shall appeal, and I would
ask my readers, whatever their nationality, to remember that on the
burning plains of India and the rolling prairies of Canada, in the vast
expanses of the Australian Bush and the African Veld, there are neither
Englishmen nor Scotsmen, Welshmen nor Irishmen; but only Citizens of
the Empire, brothers in blood and speech, and fellow-workers in the
building up of the noblest and stateliest fabric that human hands have
ever reared or God’s sun has ever shone upon.
I
_WILLIAM THE NORMAN,_
_PIRATE AND NATION-MAKER_
I
WILLIAM THE NORMAN
It may strike those of my readers who have only got their history from
their school-books as somewhat strange that I should begin my record
of British Empire-Makers with a man whom they have been taught to look
upon as a foreigner, an invader, a conqueror, and a ruthless oppressor
of the English.
The answer is simple, though manifold. The school-books are only filled
with potted facts, and are therefore wrong and unreliable. It has been
well said that England was made on the shores of the Baltic Sea and the
German Ocean. The so-called Englishmen who occupied it at the time of
the Conquest were not Englishmen at all, for the simple reason that the
true English race had yet to be born, and, after it, the true British.
The England and Scotland of the eleventh century were peopled, not by
nations, but by tribes mostly at bitter and constant war with each
other. There were still Jutes and Angles, Picts and Scots, Danes and
Swedes and Norwegians, each occupying their own little stretch of
country, and governed, more or less effectually, by their chieftains,
in proof of which it is enough to recall the fact that Harold’s last
fight but one was against his own brother, who had come across the
Narrow Seas at the head of a miscellaneous crowd of hungry pirates to
steal as much as he could of the ownerless heritage that Edward the
Confessor had left behind him.
A good deal of sentiment, more or less born of deftly-written romances,
has glorified the memory of this same Harold. Whether it was deserved
or not does not concern us now, any more than does his right or unright
to the throne of England. It is enough here to grant him all honour as
an able leader of armies, and a man who knew how to snatch victory from
defeat, and glory from disaster by dying like a hero surrounded by the
corpses of his foes.
The idle question whether he or William had the better right to the
crown of England may be left to those who care for such quibbling. Let
us, at the outset, in the words of the Sage of Chelsea, “clear our
minds of cant.” There is no “right” or “wrong” in these things, saving
only the eternal right of the strongest and wisest--the fittest or
most suitable, in short, to wield power and dominion whether the less
fit like it or not. The peoples are thrust headlong into the fiery
crucible of War, and, on the adamantine anvil of Destiny, the Thor’s
Hammer of Battle beats and crushes them into the shape that God has
designed for them. It seems a rude method, but in many thousands of
years we have found no other, so at least we may conclude that it is
the best one known.
There is a very deep meaning in the seemingly flippant and almost
impious saying of Napoleon: “God fights on the side of the biggest
battalions.” He does--but you must reckon the bigness of the
battalions, not only by their numbers, but by the value of their units,
remembering always that one man with a stout heart and a cause he
honestly believes in is worth a score who have neither heart nor faith.
Just such a man was William the Norman, son of Robert the Magnificent,
otherwise styled the Devil, and Arlette the Fair, daughter of Fulbert
the Tanner of Falaise. It is in this birth of his that we find the
first clue to his real greatness. He was born of a union unhallowed
by the sanction of the Church, among a people proud beyond all modern
belief of their royal sea-king ancestry.
How did he come to achieve this almost miraculous triumph over a
prejudice and hostility of which we can now form but a very dim idea?
We have to look no farther than his cradle to find the answer. Lying
there, the little fellow used to grasp the straw in his baby fists
with such a grip that it could not be pulled away from him. The straw
broke first, and ever in his after life what William the Norman laid
hold of he held on to; and that is why he became the first of our
Empire-Makers.
No doubt it was the strain of the old pirate blood which ran so
strongly in his veins that made him this. If we have successfully
cleared our minds of cant, we shall see plainly that, since all nations
begin in piracy of some sort, it is natural to expect that the best
pirates will prove the best Empire-Makers. That old strain is, happily,
not yet exhausted. When it is, Great and Greater Britain will be no
more.
Few men have passed unscathed through such a stormy youth as his was.
When he was seven years old his father, Duke Robert, having exacted
an oath of unwilling fealty from his under-lords to his bonny but
base-born heir, went away on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he
never returned, leaving him to the wardship of his friend, Alan of
Brittany; and soon after Duke Robert’s death became known Alan was
poisoned. After that for a dozen years the boy Duke was in constant
peril of his life.
One night two lads were lying sleeping side by side in the castle of
Vaudreuil, and in the silence and darkness of the night one of the
Montgomeries, bitter enemies of the Lords of Falaise, to whose hate
Alan of Brittany had already fallen a victim, crept up to the bedside
with a naked dagger, and drove it blindly into the heart of one of the
boys and fled.
Young Duke William--he was only a lad of twelve then--woke up to find
himself wet with his playmate’s blood, but all unknowing then how
nearly the history of the world had come to being changed by that foul
and happily misdirected dagger-stroke. Had it found his heart instead
there would have been no Norman Conquest, no blending of the two
strains of blood from which has sprung the Imperial Race of earth, no
British Empire, no United States of America--without all of which the
world would surely have been very different.
Seven more years of plot and intrigue, of strife and turmoil, young
Duke William lived through after this, growing ever keener in mind
and stronger in body, and, as we may well believe, hardening into the
incarnation of ruthless and yet wisely-directed Force which was so
soon to make him a power among men. Before he was twenty he shot his
arrows from a bow which no other man in his dukedom could bend, and he
was already a finished knight, a pattern of the gentleman of his age,
good horseman, good swordsman, gentle towards women and stern towards
men, pure in his morals and moderate in his living; a good Christian
according to his lights and the ideas of his day, and above all
faithful to the ideals that he had set before himself.
Already at nineteen--that is to say in the year 1044--not only had he
shaped his plans for reducing the disorder of his turbulent dukedom to
discipline, but he had made his designs so manifest that the lawless
lords and robber barons could see for themselves how stern a master he
would make--as in good truth he did--and the deadly work of conspiracy
started afresh. One night when he was sleeping in his favourite castle
of Valognes, Golet, his court fool, came hammering at his bedroom door
with his bauble, crying out that some traitor had let the assassins
into the stronghold. He leapt out of bed, huddled on a few clothes as
he ran to the stable, mounted his horse, and galloped away all through
the night toward Falaise along a road which is called the Duke’s Road
to this day. No sooner was he safe across the estuary of the Oune and
Vire and in the Bayeux district than he pulled his dripping, panting
horse up in front of the church of St. Clement, dismounted and knelt
down to say his prayers and thank God for his merciful deliverance.
Such was the youth who was father to the man justly styled William the
Conqueror.
It was not long after this that the years of intrigue and plotting
ended in armed revolt. Guy of Burgundy, William’s kinsman and once his
playmate, looked with greedy eyes on the fair lands of Normandy. He
was master of many provinces already, and among his hosts of friends
there were not a few of William’s own under-lords, in whose breasts
still rankled the shame of owning a bastard for their master. To his
side came the Viscount of Coutance, Randolph of Bayeux, Hamon of
Thorigny and Creuilly, and that Grimbald of Plessis whose hand was
to have slain William that night in Valognes, and in the end this
long-gathering storm burst on the grassy slopes of Val-ès-Dunes.
Master Wace the Chronicler, in his “Roman de Rou,” gives us a brilliant
little picture of that long-past scene where the future Conqueror won
his spurs--of many a brave and gallant gentleman clad _cap-à-pie_ in
shining mail, seated on mighty chargers impatiently pawing the ground,
of long lances gay with fluttering ribbons tied on by dainty hands that
morning, of waving plumes and flaunting pennons, and mild-eyed cattle
grazing knee-deep in the long wet grass in peaceful ignorance of the
bloody work that was about to be done.
But with all this we have little to do, and one episode must suffice.
The starkest warrior among the rebels was Hardrez, Lord of Bayeux, and
he, like many another, had sworn to slay William that day with his own
hands. The oath had proved fatal to others before it did to him, but
at length his turn came. Young Duke William saw him from afar, and
with lance in rest made for him at a gallop. One of the knights who
had followed Hardrez to battle charged at him in mid-course. The next
moment horse and man went rolling in the grass, and William, dropping
his splintered lance, drew his sword, and, the Lord of Bayeux coming up
at the instant, he drove the good steel with one shrewd, strong thrust
through mail and flesh and bone, and Hardrez never spoke again.
That stroke won William his dukedom, and the Chronicler, though a man
of Bayeux himself, tells in stirring lines how the young lord and his
faithful knights hunted the flying rebels off the field and rode them
down like sheep.
This was not the last fight that William had for the mastery of his
own land, but it left his hands free to begin the work that he had set
himself to do, and he did it. To him unity was strength, and he was
ready to go to any lengths to get it. His methods then, as afterwards
in England, were severe--we should call them brutal nowadays, but these
days are not those.
[Illustration: HE DROVE THE GOOD STEEL THROUGH MAIL AND FLESH AND BONE.]
When the citizens of Alençon defied him they indulged in the pleasantry
of hanging raw hides over the walls and beating them, shouting out the
while that here there was plenty for the tanner’s son to do. He set
his teeth and swore his favourite oath--by the Splendour of God--that
they should have work enough ere he had done with them. When the city
lay at his mercy he had two-and-thirty of the humourists sent out to
him, and cut off their ears and noses and hands and feet, and had
them tossed over the walls as a sort of hint that he was not quite the
kind of person who could appreciate jokes about his ancestors. It was
an inhuman deed, but history records no other public aspersions of the
good name of Duke William’s mother.
Yet one more battle the young Duke had to fight before he crossed
the Narrow Seas to the famous field of Senlac. Henry of France, his
titular overlord, and Geoffrey of Anjou, jealous of the fast-growing
power of Normandy, united their forces in an expedition which was half
an invasion and half a plundering raid. Duke William, with infinite
patience, and a quiet, marvellous self-restraint, held his own fiery
temper and the angry ardour of his knights in check, watching the
invaders burn town after town and village after village, and turning
some of his fairest domains into a wilderness.
He never struck a blow until, one fatal afternoon, he swooped down from
Falaise and caught the French army severed in two by the rising flood
of the river Dive. Then he struck, and struck hard, and when the bloody
work was over, Henry was glad to buy a truce and his liberty from his
vassal with the strong castle of Tillièries and all its lands, and so
heavy hearted was he at his defeat that, as the Chronicler tells us,
“he never bore shield or spear again.”
Normandy had now become the most orderly and best governed country in
Europe. Robbers, noble and otherwise, were ruthlessly suppressed, and
the poorest possessed their goods in peace, while William himself had
time to turn his thoughts to the gentler, and yet not less important,
concerns of policy and love-making.
The old story of his courtship of the fair Matilda of Flanders with a
riding whip is evidently a myth manufactured by some Saxon enemy, for
Duke William was in the first place a gentleman, and, moreover, the
lady and her parents were as anxious as he was for the marriage, seeing
that he was now the most desirable of suitors. The truth is that the
Church opposed their union on some shadowy grounds of consanguinity,
and it did not take place until after a courtship of four years.
And now, having got our pirate Duke happily married and seen him
undisputed lord of his own realm, we may go with him to St. Valery on
the coast of Ponthieu and watch him working and praying and offering
gifts at the old shrine, during those fifteen long days that he watched
the weather-cocks and prayed for the south wind that was to waft his
fleet and army over to the English shore.
It was on Wednesday, the 27th of September, that the wind at last
veered round. The eager soldiery hailed the change as the granting
of their prayers and the consent of Heaven to the beginning of their
enterprise, and flung themselves into their ships like a great host of
schoolboys setting out on a holiday. Soon the grey sea was covered
with a swarm of craft, and it must have seemed as though the old Viking
days had come back as the great square sails went up to the mast-heads,
and the shining shields were hung along the bulwarks.
William himself, in his golden ship _Mora_, the present of his own
dear Duchess, led the way with the sacred banner of the Pope at his
mast-head, and the three Lions of Normandy floating astern. The _Mora_
was lighter heeled or lighter loaded than the rest, for when morning
dawned she was alone on the sea with the Sussex shore in plain sight.
But presently a great forest of masts and clouds of gaily-coloured
sails rose up out of the grey waters astern, and the whole vast fleet
came on, urged by oar and wind, and by nine o’clock that morning the
fore-foot of the _Mora_, close followed by her consorts, struck the
English ground in Pevensey Bay.
It has often been told how William, as he landed, stumbled and fell on
his hands and knees, and how those near him cried out that it was a
fatal omen. The story may be myth or fact, but nothing could be more
characteristic of the true man than his springing to his feet with both
hands full of sand and laughing out in that great voice of his:
“Nay, by the Splendour of God, not so. See! Have I not taken seizin of
my new kingdom and lawful heritage?”
But the army of the so-called English, that they had come to seek was
nowhere to be found, and some days were spent in uncertainty and debate
as to whether they should march on London or await battle on the shore
with their sea communications open, and in the end they took the latter
and the wiser course.
Meanwhile, as has been said, Harold was away in the North fighting and
beating his brother Tostig and his fellow robbers, and the news of
Duke William’s landing was flying northward to him. It must have been
something of an anxious time for both--the Norman waiting day after
day in that deadly inaction which is most fatal of all things to the
courage and discipline of an army, and Harold hurrying southward at
the head of his victorious troops, knowing that he was about to try
conclusions with the best leader and the finest soldiery in Europe.
It is of little import here and to us now which of them had the best
right, as the lawyer-quibble has it, to that which they were about to
fight for. The point is that such claims as either had they were going
to submit to the stern and final ordeal of battle--and in good truth a
stern ordeal it proved to be.
As he came to the South the standard of Harold--the Fighting Man--was
joined by troops of recruits attracted by the fame of his northern
victory, and it was a great and really formidable army which at length
assembled between London and the Sussex coast. Meanwhile the Normans,
after the fashion of the pitiless warfare of those days, were dividing
their time between the building of entrenched camps and ravaging,
plundering, and burning throughout the pleasant Southern land.
Of course messages and parleyings passed between them. Harold from his
royal house at Westminster bade Duke William come and fight him for his
capital and his kingdom, to which Duke William warily replied: “Come
and drive us into the sea if you can!” This at length King Harold was
forced to attempt. And so it came to pass that, at length, on the 14th
of October, the hosts of the Saxon and the Norman confronted each other
on the field of Senlac by Hastings, on the morrow to strike blows whose
echoes were to ring through many a long century, and to do deeds more
mighty in their effect than either Harold or William dreamt of.
The Norman host has been called a horde of mailed robbers and
cut-throats, eager only for plunder, and the Saxon army has been almost
canonised as a band of heroes, gathered together to die in defence of
their native land and their lawful king. Yet, strangely enough, the
robbers and cut-throats spent the best part of the night confessing
their sins and praying for victory, as well as in making the best
dispositions to attain it. The patriots spent the same hours feasting
and drinking, and swaggering to each other about the brave deeds they
had done in the North and the greater things they were going to do on
the morrow.
So the night passes, and the morning dawns grey and chill on the two
now silent hosts. Then from the Norman ranks rises the solemn cadence
of the Te Deum, and as this dies away the archers move out--forerunners
of those stout yeomen whose clothyard shafts were one day to win
Creçy and Agincourt. Then come the footmen with their long pikes, and
after them the mailed and mounted knights, in front of whom rides
Taillefer--Iron-Cutter and Minstrel--tossing his sword into the air and
catching it, and singing the while the Song of Roland and Roncesvalles.
As the archers and pikemen spread out in skirmishing order he sets
spurs to his horse and charges at the Saxon line. He kills two men, and
then goes down under the battle-axe of a third.
Then the arrows flew fast and thick, and charge after charge was made
upon the palisades of stakes that fenced the Saxon position, high above
which floated the Dragon Standard of Wessex and the banner of the
Fighting Man.
But the double-bladed Saxon axes were no playthings, and they were
swung by strong and strenuous arms, and every time the Norman
front came up to the breastwork it was hewn down in swathes by the
deep-biting blades. The arrows fell blunted and broken on the big
Saxon shields and stout Saxon armour, and so Duke William, with
that ever-ready resource of his, bade his archers shoot up into the
air, and then down from the grey sky there fell a rain of whirring,
steel-pointed shafts, one of which, winged by Fate, struck gallant
Harold in the eye--doubtless as he was looking up wondering at this new
manœuvre--and, piercing his brain, laid him lifeless in the midst of
his champions.
[Illustration: DUKE WILLIAM ROARED OUT THAT HE WAS ALIVE.]
Soon after this a cry went up that Duke William too was dead, and he,
hearing this, tore off his helmet--a somewhat unsafe thing to do in
such a fight--and roared out that he was alive, swearing--as usual by
the Splendour of God--that the land of England should yet be his by
nightfall.
So they laid on again. William’s horse went down under a pike-thrust.
He clove the pike-man to the chin and asked one of his knights to lend
him his horse. The knight refused, thinking more of his skin than his
loyalty, whereupon William pitched him out of the saddle, swung himself
up, and led another charge against the ever-dwindling ring of heroes
who were still hammering away with their battle-axes--and this time the
stout line wavers and breaks; the mail-clad warriors pour up the slope,
shouting that the day is won; axe and sword ring loud and fast on helm
and mail, the Saxons reel back, closing round the body of their king
and the staff of his banner.
“_Dex aide! Dex aide! Ha-Rou! Ha-Rou!_” Duke William’s men yell and
roar again as they scramble over heaps of mangled corpses filling the
trenches and blocking the breaches in the palisades. Another moment
or two of brief, bitter, and bloody struggle and the last Saxon ring
breaks and melts away, and Hastings and England are won.
What followed is history so familiar that few words more from me will
suffice. What Duke William had done in his own land he did after the
same methods in the land that had been the Saxons’. Cruel, bloody, and
savage they were beyond all doubt, but it is a question whether, even
in the doing, they were more disastrous than the ferocious anarchy and
the unceasing plunder and outrage and murder that had disgraced the
weak and divided rule of the Saxon kings. In their effect they were
a thousandfold better. Duke William believed that order was Heaven’s
first law, and, by whatever means he had at hand, he was honestly
determined to make it earth’s as well. And he succeeded, which after
all is not an unsatisfactory test of honest merit. How well he did so
let us ask, not one of his own chroniclers or troubadours, but the man
who wrote the story of his own conquered people, and this is what he
will tell us:
“Truly he was so stark a man and wroth that no man durst do anything
against his will. Bishops he set off their bishoprics, and abbots off
their abbacies, and thanes in prison. And at last he did not spare his
brother Odo. Him he set in prison. Betwixt other things we must not
forget the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man that was
worth aught might travel over the kingdom unhurt with his bosom full
of gold. And no man durst slay another though he had suffered never so
mickle evil from the other.”
Such was this grim, stern, Thor’s-Hammer of a man, who by his strength
and cunning hewed into shape that which in after days was to become the
corner-stone of the glorious, world-shadowing fabric which we call the
British Empire.
II
_EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS_
“_BURY ME NOT TILL YOU HAVE CONQUERED SCOTLAND_”
II
EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS
Two centuries all but nine years have passed away since William the
Conqueror, unwept, if not unhonoured, lost his life in avenging a
paltry joke, and left his work for others to carry on. In the two
centuries not much has been done, although no little show has been made
meanwhile, and a great clash of arms has resounded through the world.
William the Red has died, as he lived, in a somewhat ignoble and futile
manner. Henry I. has done one good thing, wedding, as it were, in his
own person and that of the Lady Matilda, the two races which were
afterwards to be one.
Stephen and Matilda have settled their differences and died, after the
shedding of much wasted blood. Henry II., by the hand of Strongbow and
his licensed pirates, has done a piece of good work badly in beginning
that conquest of Ireland which is not to be completed until the Battle
of the Boyne is lost and won.
Richard Lionheart has won much glory to very small profit in the
magnificent madness of the Third Crusade. The barons, recognising,
however dimly and clumsily, that they are, in good truth, citizens of
the infant State whose lusty, turbulent youth already gives promise
of its future strength and greatness, have become law-lords as well
as landlords, and with mailed hands have guided that unwilling pen of
John’s along the bottom of the parchment on which the Great Charter is
written.
And, lastly, Simon of Montfort has taken a swift stride through several
centuries and, arriving at the modern idea that the making of nations
and the ordering of the world can be achieved by Talk, has, after
not a little violence and the spilling of considerable blood that
might have been better spent, got together that first Parliament or
Talking-Machine, whose successors have so sorely hindered the progress
of the world and balked the efforts of those appointed by God, and not
by the counting of noses, to do its work.
So the two noisy and somewhat foolish centuries have rolled away into a
blessed oblivion with a good deal of shouting and swaggering, of strife
and bloodshed, but of little progress, saving that one Roger Bacon has
lived and written a certain book and made himself a name for ever.
But all this time the work with which we are here most concerned, the
making of an empire, has been waiting for the next God-sent man to come
and do it, and this man was Edward Plantagenet, surnamed Longlegs,
next in lineal succession, not as king, but as Empire-Maker, to him who
won the fight at Senlac and got himself so well obeyed that “no man
durst do anything against his will”--which was a great deal to say of
any one in such days as those.
Edward of the Long Legs came on to the stage of History with long,
swift, determined, and, in short, wholly characteristic strides. The
Talking-Machine of the good Earl Simon had worked noisily, as is usual
with such machines, and had produced little but sound and fury.
There was war all round, and the usual anarchy in Ireland and Wales.
Llewelyn, Lord of Snowdon, for instance, had pitted himself gallantly
against the logic of circumstances, and was seeking to reconstruct the
ancient and now impossibly obsolete Celtic empire.
“_Be of good courage in the slaughter, cling to thy work, destroy
England and plunder its multitudes!_” his bards had sung to him, and
so he had honestly set himself to do, not recognising the fact that
empires are neither made nor re-made by mere methods of miscellaneous
blood-letting.
To the north, Scotland was divided by schisms and rent by the bitter
jealousies of its nobles and clan-chieftains, savage, rude and poor,
but gallant, strong, and very full of fight, as the English were to
learn later on.
Over the Narrow Seas the wide domains which William the Norman had
kept with his sword and which the second Henry had greatly increased by
inheritance and marriage, were slipping piecemeal away from the throne
to which they did not of right divine belong, and with which it was
therefore impossible that they should remain.
Such, in briefest outline, was the scene into which Edward Longlegs
strode, and of which he was to be for thirty-five years the central and
dominating figure. His first look round, as it were, showed him the
nature of the task which it was his destiny to forthwith set about.
With that clearness of vision without which no man has any chance
of success in the business of empire-making, he instantly pierced
the dust-storms of battle that were rising all about him, and the
mist-clouds of debate which Earl Simon’s Talking-Machine had commenced
to vomit forth, and behind and beyond these he saw a certain Fact, a
prime necessity which had to be faced--in short a real Something of an
infinitely greater importance than tribal warfare, the aspirations of
bard-inspired princelings, or even parliamentary debates.
This was neither more nor less than the fact that, when the Maker of
all things mapped out this part of the world, it pleased Him in His
wisdom to put England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland into one little
group of islands, and from this fact Edward Longlegs drew the deduction
that the King of Kings had intended them to be under one lordship.
It seems a simple thing to say now, a fact so patent that the
mention of it seems superfluous. So does the larger fact that the
world is round; but it was a very different matter in the times
and circumstances of Edward Longlegs, and, indeed, his first and
greatest claim to stand next in succession to William the Norman
in the royal line of empire-makers consists in this: that he was
capable of that master-stroke of genius which clearly demonstrated an
imperial principle of which six hundred years of history have been the
continuous and emphatic endorsement.
No sooner was the bloody fight of Evesham over and the good Earl Simon
had breathed out his generous, if somewhat premature soul in that last
cry of his: “It is God’s grace!” than Edward Longlegs seems to have
set himself to prepare for the task that was to be his. He was not to
be king in name for some seven years more, but as the historian of
the English People with great pertinence remarked: “With the victory
of Evesham, his character seemed to mould itself into nobler form.”
In other words he was, perchance unconsciously, performing that
indispensable preliminary to all really great and true public reforms,
the reformation of himself.
Hitherto his life had been none of the best. He had been the leader of
a retinue that had made itself something like infamous in the land.
He had intrigued first with one party and then with another. He is
accused of a faithlessness which, it is said, forced the good, though
mistaken, Earl Simon into armed revolt against his liege lord--though
this may, after all, only have been a stroke of wise and necessary
policy, since he possibly saw even then that Chaos would not reform
itself into Cosmos just for being talked at.
Then again, and with curious resemblance to William of Normandy, and
later of Hastings and England, he had avenged an insult to his mother
by the slaughter of some three thousand men in the rout of Lewes and
a quite unjustifiable indulgence in pillage and slaughter when the
Barons’ War was finally over.
“It was from Earl Simon,” says John Richard Green in one of those
limpid sentences of his, “as the Earl owned with a proud bitterness
ere his death, that Edward had learnt the skill in warfare which
distinguished him among the princes of his time. But he had learnt from
the Earl the far nobler lesson of a self-government which lifted him
high above them as ruler among men.”
It seemed, indeed, as though, by this reformation of himself, he was to
typify that reformation of England which it was his life-work to begin.
The new Edward was to be the maker of the new England.
His first action after the war was characteristic of the man and
the work that he was to do. The cessation of the fighting, as was
usual in those days, had left an undesirable number of truculent
warriors of various ranks wandering at large about the kingdom with
their legitimate occupation gone. Edward, with that instinct of
order characteristic of all true empire-makers, saw in these the
possibilities of disorder, and with a happy combination of wisdom and
adventure turned their swords and lances away from the bodies of their
fellow-citizens by taking them to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land.
An incident of this excursion has been adorned by one of those pleasant
fictions which, if the paradox may be pardoned, are none the less true
for the fact that they are false. Edward, having sent certain hundreds
of Moslems to Paradise with a perhaps unnecessarily ruthless dispatch,
was considered by the sect of the Assassins to be a person who would be
better dead than alive in Palestine, and so one of them, after several
attempts, succeeded, as one may put it, in interviewing him privately
with a poisoned dagger. The fiction has it that his consort, Eleanor of
Castille, sucked the poison from the wound with her own sweet lips and
so saved his life.
It is a pretty story, but, unfortunately for its authenticity, no
one seems to have heard of it or thought it worth the telling until
Ptolemy of Lucca told it a good half-century afterwards. But the
truth underlying it remains, and this truth is that Edward Longlegs
was blessed with that greatest of all earthly blessings, a loving and
devoted wife.
The facts of the matter are few but eloquent. Edward saw the dagger
before it struck him, and gripped the would-be murderer with a grip
worthy the muscles of Lionheart himself. There was a struggle, during
which the dagger-point scratched his arm. A moment after it was buried
in the assassin’s own heart. Then some of Edward’s retainers, hearing
the scuffling, burst into the tent and satisfied themselves that the
wretch had attempted his last murder by the somewhat superfluous method
of knocking out his brains with a foot-stool.
Soon after this symptoms of poisoning showed themselves, and Edward, in
his usual businesslike way, made his will and his peace with God and
prepared to “salute the world” with becoming dignity. In the end not
Eleanor’s lips but the surgeon’s knife removed the danger, and so once
again a dagger-thrust which had come near to changing the history of
Britain missed its mark.
It was during his return from this Crusade, as he was journeying
through Calabria, that he met the messengers who told him that his
father was dead and that he was King of England. Charles of Anjou,
who was riding with him at the moment, wondered at the great grief he
showed, and, being himself a man almost incapable of feeling, asked
him why he should show more grief at his father’s death than he had
done for the loss of his baby son who had died a short time before. The
answer was to the point and worthy of the man.
[Illustration: EDWARD GRIPPED THE WOULD-BE MURDERER.]
“By the goodness of God,” he said, “the loss of my boy may be made good
to me, but not even God’s own mercy can give me a father again.”
It was on the same journey that there occurred that curious incident
which is called the “Little Battle of Chalons,” and which is also
instructive in giving us another view of the man who could use such
wise and pious words as these. While he was travelling through Guienne,
the Count of Chalons, one of the best and starkest knights of his age,
sent a friendly message to request the favour of being allowed to break
a lance with him. Edward, though he had been repeatedly warned of plots
against his life by those who had designs on his French dominions, and
though as a king he had a perfect right to decline the challenge of a
vassal, was, as we should say nowadays, too good a sportsman to say no;
but he took the precaution of going to the knightly trysting-place with
an escort of a thousand men--in doing which he was well justified by
the fact that the Count of Chalons was there waiting for him with about
two thousand.
During the trouble which inevitably followed, the Count of Chalons did
break a lance with Edward, but it was his own lance, and this failing,
he gripped him round the neck in the most unknightly fashion and tried
to drag him from the saddle. The Count was a strong man, but Edward was
a little stronger, so he just sat still, and swinging his horse round,
pulled him out of the saddle instead, after which, to put it into plain
English, he gave him a sound thrashing, and when he at length cried
for quarter, Edward, ever generous in the moment of victory, gave him
the life that he had forfeited by his treachery, but, as a punishment,
which the coroneted scoundrel justly deserved, he compelled him to take
his sword back from the hands of a common soldier, and so disgraced him
for ever in the eyes of his peers.
It may be added that the Little Battle of Chalons, in spite of the
difference of numbers, ended in something like a picnic for the
English, after which the king betook himself in leisurely fashion to
the throne, and the work that was waiting for him.
No sooner was the crown upon his head, than he got to his task. The
Prince of Snowdon, now calling himself Prince of Wales, had not only
made himself master of his own country, but had pushed the war into
England and reduced several English towns, the chief of which was
Shrewsbury. Edward called upon him to restore the peace which he had
broken, and to come and do homage for his lands. Llewelyn, in the
plentitude of his pride, told him to come and fetch him.
Edward took a note of this, but waited two years while he replenished
the royal treasury by more or less justifiable means. During this time,
as it happened, the Prince’s promised bride, Eleanor, daughter of Earl
Simon, fell into his hands. Again and again he summoned the Prince to
perform the act of allegiance, holding his sweetheart meanwhile as a
hostage in honourable captivity.
At length a fresh defiance from the Welshman roused him to action, and
Longlegs strode swiftly across England and struck out hard and heavy.
A single blow dissipated the dream of Celtic empire for ever. Llewelyn
fled to his mountains and at length sued for peace. By rights his life
was forfeit for rebellion, yet Edward not only forgave him but remitted
the fine of £50,000 which he had imposed on the Welsh chieftains, and
then invited Llewelyn to his court and married him with all due pomp
and circumstance to the daughter of his old enemy--from which it will
be seen that Edward Longlegs, like William the Norman, and indeed all
good and capable empire-makers, was a gentleman.
Unhappily, Llewelyn repaid the kindness and courtesy by new rebellion,
which ended, as it deserved, in disaster. Merlin had prophesied that,
when money was made round, a Welsh prince should be crowned in London.
During this last revolt Edward had caused round halfpence and farthings
to be coined. When it was over the head of Llewelyn was sent to London
and crowned with a garland of ivy on Tower Hill.
What Longlegs had thus done with Wales he sought by more devious and
less effective means to do with Scotland. The dispute between Balliol
and Bruce gave him the opportunity of intervention, and of this the
dismal results are too well known to need detailed description at this
time of day.
Here, again, we have nothing to do with personal right or wrong, or
with the ethics of national independence. The business of empire-making
is too urgent to wait for matters of this kind. It would perhaps have
been better if Edward, after the sack and slaughter of Berwick, had
hurled the whole weight of the English power against the object of his
attack, as William the Norman would have done, and once and for all
crushed the opposition into impotence.
It would have been bitter and bloody work, as the work of empire-making
is apt to be, but the end might have justified the means. Certainly
some centuries of bloodshed and bitterness would have been saved. The
high ideal of a United Kingdom would have been realised nearly five
hundred years earlier, and the progress of both realms in civilisation,
wealth, and power might have been quickened immeasurably.
And after all, neither side in the long struggle would have lost
anything worthy of being weighed against the greatness of the gain to
both. There would have been no Stirling Bridge, but then there would
have been no Falkirk; no Bannockburn, but also no Flodden Field. All
this, as it happens, however, was not written in the Book of Destiny,
and so it does not concern us here, since we have to consider how much
of the work of empire-making Edward did, not what he failed to do or
left undone.
The surrender of Stirling in 1305 apparently completed the conquest of
Scotland, and Edward was for the time being the actual and undisputed
sovereign of the whole country from the Pentland Firth to the English
Channel, and it is probable that the conquest would have been a
permanent one but for the entrance of another power into the field,
and this was nothing less than the English Baronage itself. It was as
though the chiefs of his own army had turned against him, and, in the
fatal dispute which followed, Robert the Bruce saw his opportunity, and
in the end re-won for Scotland that independence which has cost her so
much and which, however precious as a matter of sentiment, was destined
to prove of so little value to her.
All that is past and done with now, but still no one who holds that an
empire is greater than a nation, even as the whole is greater than its
part, can help looking back with regretful thoughts upon those pages of
our history which would have been so much brighter and more glorious if
those gallant Scots who fought through those long and bitter wars could
have stood, as they have done since, side by side with their brothers
of the South, and so made possible centuries ago the beginning of that
great work in which they have borne so splendid a part.
Had that been so Edward Longlegs might have been the founder instead
of only one of the makers of the British Empire, and that last piteous
scene by the sandy shores of the Solway Firth would never have been
enacted.
But though in the end he neither conquered Scotland nor founded the
United Kingdom, he did something else which, as the centuries went by,
proved but little less important, for he began to make the British
Constitution.