We have already mentioned the career of the Englishman Wycliffe (_c._

1320-1384), and how he translated the Bible into English in order to set

up a counter authority to that of the Pope. He denounced the doctrines

of the church about the mass as disastrous error, and particularly the

teaching that the consecrated bread eaten in that ceremony becomes in

some magical way the actual body of Christ. We will not pursue the

question of transubstantiation, as this process of the mystical change

of the elements in the sacrament is called, into its intricacies. These

are matters for the theological specialist. But it will be obvious that

any doctrine, such as the Catholic doctrine, which makes the

consecration of the elements in the sacrament a miraculous process

performed by the priest, and only to be performed by the priest, and

which makes the sacrament the central necessity of the religious system,

enhances the importance of the priestly order enormously. On the other

hand, the view, which was the typical “Protestant” view, that this

sacrament is a mere eating of bread and drinking of wine as a personal

remembrance of Jesus of Nazareth, does away at last with any particular

need for a consecrated priest at all. Wycliffe himself did not go to

this extremity; he was a priest, and he remained a priest to the end of

his life, but his doctrine raised a question that carried men far beyond

his positions. From the point of view of the historian the struggle

against Rome that Wycliffe opened became very speedily a struggle of

what one may call rational or layman’s religion making its appeal to the

free intelligence and the free conscience in mankind, against

authoritative, traditional, ceremonial, and priestly religion. The

ultimate tendency of this complicated struggle was to strip Christianity

as bare as Islam of every vestige of ancient priestcraft, to revert to

the Bible documents as authority, and to recover, if possible, the

primordial teachings of Jesus. Most of its issues are still undecided

among Christians to this day.[376]

Wycliffe’s writings had nowhere more influence than in Bohemia. About

1396 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of lectures in the

university of Prague based upon the doctrines of the great Oxford

teacher. Huss became rector of the university, and his teachings roused

the church to excommunicate him (1412). This was at the time of the

Great Schism, just before the Council of Constance (1414-1418) gathered

to discuss the scandalous disorder of the church. We have already told

(chap. xxxiii, § 13) how the schism was ended by the election of Martin

V. The council aspired to reunite Christendom completely. But the

methods by which it sought this reunion jar with our modern consciences.

Wycliffe’s bones were condemned to be burnt. Huss was decoyed to

Constance under promise of a safe conduct, and he was then put upon his

trial for heresy. He was ordered to recant certain of his opinions. He

replied that he could not recant until he was convinced of his error. He

was told that it was his duty to recant if his superiors required it of

him, whether he was convinced or not. He refused to accept this view. In

spite of the Emperor’s safe conduct, he was burnt alive (1415), a martyr

not for any specific doctrine, but for the free intelligence and free

conscience of mankind.

It would be impossible to put the issue between priest and anti-priest

more clearly than it was put at this trial of John Huss, or to

demonstrate more completely the evil spirit in priestcraft. A colleague

of Huss, Jerome of Prague, was burnt in the following year.

These outrages were followed by an insurrection of the Hussites in

Bohemia (1419), the first of a series of religious wars that marked the

breaking-up of Christendom. In 1420, the Pope, Martin V, issued a bull

proclaiming a crusade “for the destruction of the Wycliffites, Hussites,

and all other heretics in Bohemia,” and attracted by this invitation the

unemployed soldiers of fortune, and all the drifting blackguardism of

Europe converged upon that valiant country. They found in Bohemia, under

its great leader Ziska, more hardship and less loot than crusaders were

disposed to face. The Hussites were conducting their affairs upon

extreme democratic lines, and the whole country was aflame with

enthusiasm. The crusaders beleaguered Prague, but failed to take it, and

they experienced a series of reverses that ended in their retreat from

Bohemia. A second crusade (1421) was no more successful. Two other

crusades failed. Then unhappily the Hussites fell into internal

dissensions. Encouraged by this, a fifth crusade (1431) crossed the

frontier under Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg.

The army of these crusaders, according to the lowest estimates,

consisted of 90,000 infantry and 40,000 horsemen. Attacking Bohemia from

the west, they first laid siege to the town of Tachov, but failing to

capture the strongly fortified city, they stormed the little town of

Most, and here, as well as in the surrounding country, committed the

most horrible atrocities on a population a large part of which was

entirely innocent of any form of theology whatever. The crusaders,

advancing by slow marches, penetrated further into Bohemia, till they

reached the neighbourhood of the town of Domazlice (Tauss). “It was at

three o’clock on August 14th, 1431, that the crusaders, who were

encamped in the plain between Domazlice and Horsuv Tyn, received the

news that the Hussites, under the leadership of Prokop the Great, were

approaching. Though the Bohemians were still four miles off, the rattle

of their war-wagons and the song, ‘All ye warriors of God,’ which their

whole host was chanting, could already be heard.” The enthusiasm of the

crusaders evaporated with astounding rapidity. Lützow[377] describes how

the papal representative and the Duke of Saxony ascended a convenient

hill to inspect the battlefield. It was, they discovered, not going to

be a battlefield. The German camp was in utter confusion. Horsemen were

streaming off in every direction, and the clatter of empty wagons being

driven off almost drowned the sound of that terrible singing. The

crusaders were abandoning even their loot. Came a message from the

Margrave of Brandenburg advising flight; there was no holding any of

their troops. They were dangerous now only to their own side, and the

papal representative spent an unpleasant night hiding from them in the

forest.... So ended the Bohemian crusade.

In 1434 civil war again broke out among the Hussites, in which the

extreme and most valiant section was defeated, and in 1436 an agreement

was patched up between the Council of Basle and the moderate Hussites,

in which the Bohemian church was allowed to retain certain distinctions

from the general Catholic practice, which held good until the German

Reformation in the sixteenth century.

§ 3

The split among the Hussites was largely due to the drift of the

extremer section towards a primitive communism, which alarmed the

wealthier and more influential Czech noblemen. Similar tendencies had

already appeared among the English Wycliffites. They seem to follow

naturally enough upon the doctrines of equal human brotherhood that

emerge whenever there is an attempt to reach back to the fundamentals of

Christianity.

The development of such ideas had been greatly stimulated by a

stupendous misfortune that had swept the world and laid bare the

foundations of society, a pestilence of unheard-of virulence. It was

called the Black Death, and it came nearer to the extirpation of mankind

than any other evil has ever done. It was far more deadly than the

plague of Pericles, or the plague of Marcus Aurelius, or the plague

waves of the time of Justinian and Gregory the Great that paved the way

for the Lombards in Italy. It arose in South Russia or Central Asia, and

came by way of the Crimea and a Genoese ship to Genoa and Western

Europe. It passed by Armenia to Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa. It

reached England in 1348. Two thirds of the students at Oxford died, we

are told; it is estimated that between a quarter and a half of the whole

population of England perished at this time. Throughout all Europe there

was as great a mortality. Hecker estimates the total as twenty-five

million dead. It spread eastward to China, where, the Chinese records

say, thirteen million people perished. In China the social

disorganization led to a neglect of the river embankments, and as a

consequence great floods devastated the crowded agricultural lands.[378]

Never was there so clear a warning to mankind to seek knowledge and

cease from bickering, to unite against the dark powers of nature. All

the massacres of Hulagu and Timurlane were as nothing to this. “Its

ravages,” says J. R. Green, “were fiercest in the greater towns, where

filthy and undrained streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and

fever. In the burial-ground which the piety of Sir Walter Manny

purchased for the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards

marked by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said

to have been interred. Thousands of people perished at Norwich, while in

Bristol the living were hardly able to bury the dead. But the Black

Death fell on the villages almost as fiercely as on the towns. More than

one half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have perished; in the

diocese of Norwich two thirds of the parishes changed their incumbents.

The whole organization of labour was thrown out of gear. The scarcity of

hands made it difficult for the minor tenants to perform the services

due for their lands, and only a temporary abandonment of half the rent

by the landowners induced the farmers to refrain from the abandonment of

their farms. For a time cultivation became impossible. ‘The sheep and

cattle strayed through the fields and corn,’ says a contemporary, ‘and

there were none left who could drive them.’”

[Illustration: “We have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the

feldes”....John Ball’s speech]

It was from these distresses that the peasant wars of the fourteenth

century sprang. There was a great shortage of labour and a great

shortage of goods, and the rich abbots and monastic cultivators who

owned so much of the land, and the nobles and rich merchants, were too

ignorant of economic laws to understand that they must not press upon

the toilers in this time of general distress. They saw their property

deteriorating, their lands going out of cultivation, and they made

violent statutes to compel men to work without any rise in wages, and to

prevent their straying in search of better employment. Naturally enough

this provoked “a new revolt against the whole system of social

inequality which had till then passed unquestioned as the divine order

of the world. The cry of the poor found a terrible utterance in the

words of ‘a mad priest of Kent,’ as the courtly Froissart calls him, who

for twenty years (1360-1381) found audience for his sermons, in defiance

of interdict and imprisonment, in the stout yeomen who gathered in the

Kentish churchyards. ‘Mad,’ as the landowners called him, it was in the

preaching of John Ball that England first listened to a declaration of

natural equality and the rights of man. ‘Good people,’ cried the

preacher, ‘things will never go well in England so long as goods be not

in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right

are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what grounds have

they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we all came of the

same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they say or prove that

they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by

our toil what they spend in their pride? They are clothed in velvet and

warm in their furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags.

They have wine and spices and fair bread; and we oat-cake and straw, and

water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and

labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of

our toil that these men hold their state.’ A spirit fatal to the whole

system of the Middle Ages breathed in the popular rhyme which condensed

the levelling doctrine of John Ball: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who

was then the gentleman?’”[379]

Wat Tyler, the leader of the English insurgents, was assassinated by the

Mayor of London in the presence of the young King Richard II (1381), and

his movement collapsed. The communist side of the Hussite movement was a

part of the same system of disturbance. A little earlier than the

English outbreak had occurred the French “Jacquerie” (1358), in which

the French peasants had risen, burnt châteaux, and devastated the

country-side. A century later the same urgency was to sweep Germany into

a series of bloody Peasant Wars. These began late in the fifteenth

century. Economic and religious disturbance mingled in the case of

Germany even more plainly than in England. One conspicuous phase of

these German troubles was the Anabaptist outbreak. The sect of the

Anabaptists appeared in Wittenberg in 1521 under three “prophets,” and

broke out into insurrection in 1525. Between 1532 and 1535 the

insurgents held the town of Münster in Westphalia, and did their utmost

to realize their ideas of a religious communism. They were besieged by

the Bishop of Münster, and under the distresses of the siege a sort of

insanity ran rife in the town; cannibalism is said to have occurred, and

a certain John of Leyden seized power, proclaimed himself the successor

of King David, and followed that monarch’s evil example by practising

polygamy. After the surrender of the city the victorious bishop had the

Anabaptist leaders tortured very horribly and executed in the

marketplace, their mutilated bodies being hung in cages from a church

tower to witness to all the world that decency and order were now

restored in Münster....

These upheavals of the common labouring men of the Western European

countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were more serious

and sustained than anything that had ever happened in history before.

The nearest previous approach to them were certain communistic

Muhammadan movements in Persia. There was a peasant revolt in Normandy

about A.D. 1000, and there were revolts of peasants (Bagaudæ) in the

later Roman Empire, but these were not nearly so formidable. They show a

new spirit growing in human affairs, a spirit altogether different from

the unquestioning apathy of the serfs and peasants in the original

regions of civilization or from the anarchist hopelessness of the serf

and slave labour of the Roman capitalists. All these early insurrections

of the workers that we have mentioned were suppressed with much cruelty,

but the movement itself was never completely stamped out. From that time

to this there has been a spirit of revolt in the lower levels of the

pyramid of civilization. There have been phases of insurrection, phases

of repression, phases of compromise and comparative pacification; but

from that time until this, the struggle has never wholly ceased. We

shall see it flaring out during the French Revolution at the end of the

eighteenth century, insurgent again in the middle and at the opening of

the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and achieving vast

proportions in the world of to-day. The socialist movement of the

nineteenth century was only one version of that continuing revolt.

In many countries, in France and Germany and Russia, for example, this

labour movement has assumed at times an attitude hostile to

Christianity, but there can be little doubt that this steady and, on the

whole, growing pressure of the common man in the West against a life of

toil and subservience is closely associated with Christian teaching. The

church and the Christian missionary may not have intended to spread

equalitarian doctrines, but behind the church was the unquenchable

personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and even in spite of himself the

Christian preacher brought the seeds of freedom and responsibility with

him, and sooner or later they shot up where he had been.

This steady and growing upheaval of “Labour,” its development of a

consciousness of itself as a class and of a definite claim upon the

world at large, quite as much as the presence of schools and

universities, quite as much as abundant printed books and a developing

and expanding process of scientific research, mark off our present type

of civilization, the “modern civilization,” from any pre-existing state

of human society, and mark it, for all its incidental successes, as a

thing unfinished and transitory. It is an embryo or it is something

doomed to die. It may be able to solve this complex problem of

co-ordinated toil and happiness, and so adjust itself to the needs of

the human soul, or it may fail and end in a catastrophe as the Roman

system did. It may be the opening phase of some more balanced and

satisfying order of society, or it may be a system destined to

disruption and replacement by some differently conceived method of human

association. Like its predecessor, our present civilization may be no

more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the

fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have grown only that,

accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again

for better things to follow. Such questions as these are the practical

realities of history, and in all that follows we shall find them

becoming clearer and more important, until in our last chapter we shall

end, as all our days and years end, with a recapitulation of our hopes

and fears--and a note of interrogation.

§ 4

The development of free discussion in Europe during this age of

fermentation was enormously stimulated by the appearance of printed

books. It was the introduction of paper from the East that made

practicable the long latent method of printing. It is still difficult to

assign the honour of priority in the use of the simple expedient of

printing for multiplying books. It is a trivial question that has been

preposterously debated.[380] Apparently the glory, such as it is,

belongs to Holland. In Haarlem, one Coster was printing from movable

type somewhen before 1446. Gutenberg was printing at Mainz about the

same time. There were printers in Italy by 1465, and Caxton set up his

press in Westminster in 1477. But long before this time there had been a

partial use of printing. Manuscripts as early as the twelfth century

display initial letters that may have been printed from wooden stamps.

Far more important is the question of the manufacture of paper. It is

scarcely too much to say that paper made the revival of Europe possible.

Paper originated in China, where its use probably goes back to the

second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the Arab

Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and among the prisoners taken

from them were some skilled paper-makers, from whom the art was learnt.

Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The

manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the capture

of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of Spain. But

under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated sadly. Good paper

was not made in Christian Europe until near the end of the thirteenth

century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the

fourteenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until the

end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the printing of

books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon printing

followed naturally and necessarily, and the intellectual life of the

world entered upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a

little trickle from mind to mind; it became a broad flood, in which

thousands and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds

participated.

One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the appearance

of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a cheapening of

school-books. The knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not

only a great increase of books in the world, but the books that were now

made were plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of

toiling at a crabbed text and then thinking over its significance,

readers now could think unimpeded as they read. With this increase in

the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be

a highly decorated toy or a scholar’s mystery. People began to write

books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. With the

fourteenth century the real history of the European literatures begins.

We find a rapid development of standard Italian, standard English,

standard French, standard Spanish, and standard German.[381] These

languages became literary languages; they were tried over, polished by

use, and made exact and vigorous. They became at last as capable of the

burden of philosophical discussion as Greek or Latin.

§ 5

Here we devote a section to certain elementary statements about the

movement in men’s religious ideas during the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries. They are a necessary introduction to the political history of

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that follows in Chapter XXXVI.

We have to distinguish clearly between two entirely different systems of

opposition to the Catholic church. They intermingled very confusingly.

The church was losing its hold upon the consciences of princes and rich

and able people; it was also losing the faith and confidence of common

people. The effect of its decline of spiritual power upon the former

class was to make them resent its interference, its moral restrictions,

its claims to overlordship, its claim to tax, and to dissolve

allegiances. They ceased to respect its power and its property. This

insubordination of princes and rulers was going on throughout the Middle

Ages, but it was only when in the sixteenth century the church began to

side openly with its old antagonist the Emperor, when it offered him its

support and accepted his help in its campaign against heresy, that

princes began to think seriously of breaking away from the Roman

communion and setting up fragments of a church. And they would never

have done so if they had not perceived that the hold of the church upon

the masses of mankind had relaxed.

The revolt of the princes was essentially an irreligious revolt against

the world-rule of the church. The Emperor Frederick II, with his

epistles to his fellow princes, was its forerunner. The revolt of the

people against the church, on the other hand, was as essentially

religious. They objected not to the church’s power, but to its

weaknesses. They wanted a deeply righteous and fearless church to help

them and organize them against the wickedness of powerful men. Their

movements against the church, within it and without, were movements not

for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant

religious control. They did not want less religious control, but

more--but they wanted to be assured that it was religious. They objected

to the Pope not because he was the religious head of the world, but

because he was not; because he was a wealthy earthly prince when he

ought to have been their spiritual leader.

The contest in Europe from the fourteenth century onward therefore was a

three-cornered contest. The princes wanted to use the popular forces

against the Pope, but not to let those forces grow too powerful for

their own power and glory. For a long time the church went from prince

to prince for an ally without realizing that the lost ally it needed to

recover was popular veneration.

Because of this triple aspect of the mental and moral conflicts that

were going on in the fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,

the series of ensuing changes, those changes that are known collectively

in history as the Reformation, took on a threefold aspect. There was the

Reformation according to the princes, who wanted to stop the flow of

money to Rome and to seize the moral authority, the educational power,

and the material possessions of the church within their dominions. There

was the Reformation according to the people, who sought to make

Christianity a power against unrighteousness, and particularly against

the unrighteousness of the rich and powerful. And finally there was the

Reformation within the church, of which St. Francis of Assisi was the

precursor, which sought to restore the goodness of the church and,

through its goodness, to restore its power.

The Reformation according to the princes took the form of a replacement

of the Pope by the prince as the head of the religion and the controller

of the consciences of his people. The princes had no idea and no

intention of letting free the judgments of their subjects more

particularly with the object-lessons of the Hussites and the Anabaptists

before their eyes; they sought to establish national churches dependent

upon the throne. As England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North

Germany, and Bohemia broke away from the Roman communion, the princes

and other ministers showed the utmost solicitude to keep the movement

well under control. Just as much reformation as would sever the link

with Rome they permitted; anything beyond that, any dangerous break

towards the primitive teachings of Jesus or the crude direct

interpretation of the Bible, they resisted. The Established Church of

England is one of the most typical and successful of the resulting

compromises. It is still sacramental and sacerdotal; but its

organization centres in the Court and the Lord Chancellor, and though

subversive views may, and do, break out in the lower and less prosperous

ranks of its priesthood, it is impossible for them to struggle up to any

position of influence and authority.

The Reformation according to the common man was very different in spirit

from the Princely Reformation. We have already told something of the

popular attempts at Reformation in Bohemia and Germany. The wide

spiritual upheavals of the time were at once more honest, more confused,

more enduring, and less immediately successful than the reforms of the

princes. Very few religious-spirited men had the daring to break away or

the effrontery to confess that they had broken away from all

authoritative teaching, and that they were now relying entirely upon

their own minds and consciences. That required a very high intellectual

courage. The general drift of the common man in this period in Europe

was to set up his new acquisition, the Bible, as a counter authority to

the church. This was particularly the case with the great leader of

German Protestantism, Martin Luther (1483-1546). All over Germany, and

indeed all over Western Europe, there were now men spelling over the

black-letter pages of the newly translated and printed Bible, over the

Book of Leviticus and the Song of Solomon and the Revelation of St. John

the Divine--strange and perplexing books--quite as much as over the

simple and inspiring record of Jesus in the Gospels. Naturally they

produced strange views and grotesque interpretations. It is surprising

that they were not stranger and grotesquer. But the human reason is an

obstinate thing, and will criticize and select in spite of its own

resolutions. The bulk of these new Bible students took what their

consciences approved from the Bible and ignored its riddles and

contradictions. All over Europe, wherever the new Protestant churches of

the princes were set up, a living and very active residuum of

Protestants remained who declined to have their religion made over for

them in this fashion. These were the Nonconformists, a medley of sects,

having nothing in common but their resistance to authoritative religion,

whether of the Pope or the State.[382] Most but not all of these

Nonconformists held to the Bible as a divinely inspired and

authoritative guide. This was a strategic rather than an abiding

position, and the modern drift of Nonconformity has been onward away

from this original Bibliolatry towards a mitigated and sentimentalized

recognition of the bare teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Beyond the range

of Nonconformity, beyond the range of professed Christianity at all,

there is also now a great and growing mass of equalitarian belief and

altruistic impulse in the modern civilizations, which certainly owes, as

we have already asserted, its spirit to Christianity, which began to

appear in Europe as the church lost its grip upon the general

mind.[383]

Let us say a word now of the third phase of the Reformation process, the

Reformation within the church. This was already beginning in the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries with the appearance of the Black and Grey

Friars (chap. xxxiii, § 13). In the sixteenth century, and when it was

most needed, came a fresh impetus of the same kind. This was the

foundation of the Society of the Jesuits by Inigo Lopez de Recalde,

better known to the world to-day as Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

[Illustration: Loyola.]

Ignatius began his career as a very tough and gallant young Spaniard. He

was clever and dexterous and inspired by a passion for pluck, hardihood,

and rather showy glory. His love affairs were free and picturesque. In

1521 the French took the town of Pampeluna in Spain from the Emperor

Charles V, and Ignatius was one of the defenders. His legs were smashed

by a cannon-ball, and he was taken prisoner. One leg was badly set and

had to be broken again, and these painful and complex operations nearly

cost him his life. He received the last sacraments. In the night,

thereafter, he began to mend, and presently he was convalescent and

facing the prospect of a life in which he would perhaps always be a

cripple. His thoughts turned to the adventure of religion. Sometimes he

would think of a certain great lady, and how, in spite of his broken

state, he might yet win her admiration by some amazing deed; and

sometimes he would think of being in some especial and personal way the

Knight of Christ. In the midst of these confusions, one night as he lay

awake, he tells us, a new great lady claimed his attention; he had a

vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary carrying the Infant Christ in her

arms. “Immediately a loathing seized him for the former deeds of his

life.” He resolved to give up all further thoughts of earthly women, and

to lead a life of absolute chastity and devotion to the Mother of God.

He projected great pilgrimages and a monastic life.

His final method of taking his vows marks him the countryman of Don

Quixote. He had regained his strength, and he was riding out into the

world rather aimlessly, a penniless soldier of fortune with little but

his arms and the mule on which he rode, when he fell into company with a

Moor. They went on together and talked, and presently disputed about

religion. The Moor was the better educated man; he had the best of the

argument, he said offensive things about the Virgin Mary that were

difficult to answer, and he parted triumphantly from Ignatius. The young

Knight of our Lady was boiling with shame and indignation. He hesitated

whether he should go after the Moor and kill him or pursue the

pilgrimage he had in mind. At a fork in the road he left things to his

mule, which spared the Moor. He came to the Benedictine Abbey of Manresa

near Montserrat, and here he imitated that peerless hero of the mediæval

romance, Amadis de Gaul, and kept an all-night vigil before the Altar of

the Blessed Virgin. He presented his mule to the abbey, he gave his

worldly clothes to a beggar, he laid his sword and dagger upon the

altar, and clothed himself in a rough sackcloth garment and hempen

shoes. He then took himself to a neighbouring hospice and gave himself

up to scourgings and austerities. For a whole week he fasted absolutely.

Thence he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

For some years he wandered, consumed with the idea of founding a new

order of religious knighthood, but not knowing clearly how to set about

this enterprise. He became more and more aware of his own illiteracy,

and the Inquisition, which was beginning to take an interest in his

proceedings, forbade him to attempt to teach others until he had spent

at least four years in study. So much cruelty and intolerance is laid at

the door of the Inquisition that it is pleasant to record that in its

handling of this heady, imaginative young enthusiast it showed itself

both sympathetic and sane. It recognized his vigour and possible uses;

it saw the dangers of his ignorance. He studied at Salamanca and Paris,

among other places. He was ordained a priest in 1538, and a year later

his long-dreamt-of order was founded under the military title of the

“Company of Jesus.” Like the Salvation Army of modern England, it made

the most direct attempt to bring the generous tradition of military

organization and discipline to the service of religion.

This Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Order of Jesuits was a man of

forty-seven; he was a very different man, much wiser and steadier, than

the rather absurd young man who had aped Amadis de Gaul and kept vigil

in the abbey of Manresa; and the missionary and educational organization

he now created and placed at the disposal of the Pope was one of the

most powerful instruments the church had ever handled. These men gave

themselves freely and wholly to be used by the church. It was the Order

of the Jesuits which carried Christianity to China again after the

downfall of the Ming Dynasty, and Jesuits were the chief Christian

missionaries in India and North America. To their civilizing work among

the Indians in South America we shall presently allude. But their main

achievement lay in raising the standard of Catholic education. Their

schools became and remained for a long time the best schools in

Christendom. Says Lord Verulam (= Sir Francis Bacon): “As for the

pedagogic part ... consult the schools of the Jesuits, for nothing

better has been put in practice.” They raised the level of intelligence,

they quickened the conscience of all Catholic Europe, they stimulated

Protestant Europe to competitive educational efforts.... Some day it may

be we shall see a new order of Jesuits, vowed not to the service of the

Pope, but to the service of mankind.

And concurrently with this great wave of educational effort, the tone

and quality of the church was also greatly improved by the

clarification of doctrine and the reforms in organization and discipline

that were made by the Council of Trent. This council met intermittently

either at Trent or Bologna between the years 1545 and 1563, and its work

was at least as important as the energy of the Jesuits in arresting the

crimes and blunders that were causing state after state to fall away

from the Roman communion. The change wrought by the Reformation within

the Church of Rome was as great as the change wrought in the Protestant

churches that detached themselves from the mother body. There are

henceforth no more open scandals or schisms to record. But if anything,

there has been an intensification of doctrinal narrowness, and such

phases of imaginative vigour as are represented by Gregory the Great, or

by the group of Popes associated with Gregory VII and Urban II, or by

the group that began with Innocent III, no longer enliven the sober and

pedestrian narrative. The world war of 1914-1918 was a unique

opportunity for the Papacy; the occasion was manifest for some clear

strong voice proclaiming the universal obligation to righteousness, the

brotherhood of men, the claims of human welfare over patriotic passion.

No such moral lead was given. The Papacy seemed to be balancing its

traditional reliance upon the faithful Habsburgs against its quarrel

with republican France.

§ 6

The reader must not suppose that the destructive criticism of the

Catholic Church and of Catholic Christianity, and the printing and study

of the Bible, were the only or even the most important of the

intellectual activities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That

was merely the popular and most conspicuous aspect of the intellectual

revival of the time. Behind this conspicuous and popular awakening to

thought and discussion, other less immediately striking but ultimately

more important mental developments were in progress. Of the trend of

these developments we must now give some brief indications. They had

begun long before books were printed, but it was printing that released

them from obscurity.

We have already told something of the first appearance of the free

intelligence, the spirit of inquiry and plain statement, in human

affairs. One name is central in the record of that first attempt at

systematic knowledge, the name of Aristotle. We have noted also the

brief phase of scientific work at Alexandria. From that time onward the

complicated economic and political and religious conflicts of Europe and

Western Asia impeded further intellectual progress. These regions, as we

have seen, fell for long ages under the sway of the Oriental type of

monarchy and of Oriental religious traditions. Rome tried and abandoned

a slave-system of industry. The first great capitalistic system

developed and fell into chaos through its own inherent rottenness.

Europe relapsed into universal insecurity. The Semite rose against the

Aryan, and replaced Hellenic civilization throughout Western Asia and

Egypt by an Arabic culture. All Western Asia and half of Europe fell

under Mongolian rule. It is only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

that we find the Nordic intelligence struggling through again to

expression.

We then find in the growing universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna

an increasing amount of philosophical discussion going on. In form it is

chiefly a discussion of logical questions. As the basis of this

discussion we find part of the teachings of Aristotle, not the whole

mass of writings he left behind him, but his logic only. Later on his

work became better known through the Latin translations of the Arabic

edition annotated by Averroes.[384]

Except for these translations of

Aristotle, very little of the Greek philosophical literature was read in

Western Europe until the fifteenth century. The creative Plato--as

distinguished from the scientific Aristotle--was almost unknown. Some

neo-Platonic writers were known, but neo-Platonism had much the same

relation to Plato that Christian Science has to Christ.

It has been the practice of recent writers to decry the philosophical

discussion of the mediæval “schoolmen” as tedious and futile. It was

nothing of the sort. It had to assume a severely technical form because

the dignitaries of the church, ignorant and intolerant, were on the

watch for heresy. It lacked the sweet clearness, therefore, of fearless

thought. It often hinted what it dared not say. But it dealt with

fundamentally important things, it was a long and necessary struggle to

clear up and correct certain inherent defects of the human mind, and

many people to-day blunder dangerously through their neglect of the

issues the schoolmen discussed.

There is a natural tendency in the human mind to exaggerate the

differences and resemblances upon which classification is based, to

suppose that things called by different names are altogether different,

and that things called by the same name are practically identical. This

tendency to exaggerate classification produces a thousand evils and

injustices. In the sphere of race or nationality, for example, a

“European” will often treat an “Asiatic” almost as if he were a

different animal, while he will be disposed to regard another “European”

as necessarily as virtuous and charming as himself. He will, as a matter

of course, take sides with Europeans against Asiatics. But, as the

reader of this history must realize, there is no such difference as the

opposition of these names implies. It is a phantom difference created by

two names....

The main mediæval controversy was between the “Realists” and the

“Nominalists,” and it is necessary to warn the reader that the word

“Realist” in mediæval discussion has a meaning almost diametrically

opposed to “Realist” as it is used in the jargon of modern criticism.

The modern “Realist” is one who insists on materialist details; the

mediæval “Realist” was far nearer what nowadays we should call an

Idealist, and his contempt for incidental detail was profound. The

Realists outdid the vulgar tendency to exaggerate the significance of

class. They held that there was something in a name, in a common noun

that is, that was essentially real. For example, they held there was a

typical “European,” an ideal European, who was far more real than any

individual European. Every European was, as it were, a failure, a

departure, a flawed specimen of this profounder reality. On the other

hand the Nominalist held that the only realities in the case were the

individual Europeans, that the name “European” was merely a name and

nothing more than a name applied to all these instances.

Nothing is quite so difficult as the compression of philosophical

controversies, which are by their nature voluminous and various and

tinted by the mental colours of a variety of minds. With the difference

of Realist and Nominalist stated baldly, as we have stated it here, the

modern reader unaccustomed to philosophical discussion may be disposed

to leap at once to the side of the Nominalist. But the matter is not so

simple that it can be covered by one instance, and here we have

purposely chosen an extreme instance. Names and classifications differ

in their value and reality. While it is absurd to suppose that there can

be much depth of class difference between men called Thomas and men

called William, or that there is an ideal and quintessential Thomas or

William, yet on the other hand there may be much profounder differences

between a white man and a Hottentot, and still more between _Homo

sapiens_ and _Homo neanderthalensis_. While again the distinction

between the class of pets and the class of useful animals is dependent

upon very slight differences of habit and application, the difference of

a cat and dog is so profound that the microscope can trace it in a drop

of blood or a single hair. When this aspect of the question is

considered, it becomes understandable how Nominalism had ultimately to

abandon the idea that names were as insignificant as labels, and how,

out of a revised and amended Nominalism, there grew up that systematic

attempt to find the _true_--the most significant and

fruitful--classification of things and substances which is called

Scientific Research.

And it will be almost as evident that while the tendency of Realism,

which is the natural tendency of every untutored mind, was towards

dogma, harsh divisions, harsh judgments, and uncompromising attitudes,

the tendency of earlier and later Nominalism was towards qualified

statements, towards an examination of individual instances, and towards

inquiry and experiment and scepticism. And it may not surprise the

reader to learn that the philosophy of the Catholic Church was

essentially a Realist philosophy.[385]

So while in the market-place and the ways of the common life men were

questioning the morals and righteousness of the clergy, the good faith

and propriety of their celibacy, and the justice of papal taxation;

while in theological circles their minds were set upon the question of

transubstantiation, the question of the divinity or not of the bread and

wine in the mass, in studies and lecture-rooms a wider-reaching

criticism of the methods of thought upon which the very fundamentals of

Catholic teaching rested was in progress. We cannot attempt here to

gauge the significance in this process of such names as Peter Abelard

(1079-1142), Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), and Thomas Aquinas

(1225-1274). These men sought to reconstruct Catholicism on a sounder

system of reasoning. Chief among their critics and successors were Duns

Scotus (?-1308), an Oxford Franciscan and, to judge by his sedulous

thought and deliberate subtleties, a Scotchman, and Occam, an Englishman

(?-1347). Both these latter, like Averroes (see chap. xxxii, § 8), made

a definite distinction between theological and philosophical truth; they

placed theology on a pinnacle, but they placed it where it could no

longer obstruct research. Duns Scotus declared that it was impossible to

prove by reasoning the existence of God or of the Trinity or the

credibility of the Act of Creation; Occam was still more insistent upon

this separation--which manifestly released scientific inquiry from

dogmatic control. A later generation, benefiting by the freedoms towards

which these pioneers worked, and knowing not the sources of its freedom,

had the ingratitude to use the name of Scotus as a term for stupidity,

and so we have our English word “Dunce.” Says Professor Pringle

Pattison,[386] “Occam, who is still a Scholastic, gives us the

Scholastic justification of the spirit which had already taken hold upon

Roger Bacon, and which was to enter upon its rights in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries.”

Standing apart by himself because of his distinctive genius is this

Roger Bacon (about 1210 to about 1293), who was also English. He was a

Franciscan of Oxford, and a very typical Englishman indeed, irritable,

hasty, honest, and shrewd. He was two centuries ahead of his world. Says

H. O. Taylor of him:[387]

“The career of Bacon was an intellectual tragedy, conforming to the old

principles of tragic art: that the hero’s character shall be large and

noble, but not flawless, inasmuch as the fatal consummation must issue

from character, and not happen through chance. He died an old man, as in

his youth, so in his age, a devotee of tangible knowledge. His pursuit

of a knowledge which was not altogether learning had been obstructed by

the Order of which he was an unhappy and rebellious member; quite as

fatally his achievement was deformed from within by the principles which

he accepted from his time. But he was responsible for his acceptance of

current opinions; and as his views roused the distrust of his brother

Friars, his intractable temper drew their hostility (of which we know

very little) on his head. Persuasiveness and tact were needed by one who

would impress such novel views as his upon his fellows or, in the

thirteenth century, escape persecution for their divulgence. Bacon

attacked dead and living worthies, tactlessly, fatuously, and unfairly.

Of his life scarcely anything is known, save from his allusions to

himself and others; and these are insufficient for the construction of

even a slight consecutive narrative. Born; studied at Oxford; went to

Paris, studied, experimented; is at Oxford again, and a Franciscan;

studies, teaches, becomes suspect to his Order, is sent back to Paris,

kept under surveillance, receives a letter from the Pope, writes,

writes, writes--his three best-known works; is again in trouble,

confined for many years, released, and dead, so very dead, body and

frame alike, until partly unearthed after five centuries.”

The bulk of these “three best-known works” is a hotly phrased and

sometimes quite abusive, but entirely just attack on the ignorance of

the times, combined with a wealth of suggestions for the increase of

knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and

of collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him.

“Experiment, experiment,” that is the burthen of Roger Bacon. Yet of

Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him because

men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored over bad

Latin translations of the master. “If I had my way,” he wrote, in his

intemperate fashion, “I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the

study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and

increase ignorance,” a sentiment that Aristotle would probably have

echoed could he have returned to a world in which his works were not so

much read as worshipped--and that, as Roger Bacon showed, in the most

abominable translations.

Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of seeming to

square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and worse, Roger

Bacon shouted to mankind, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities;

_look at the world_!” Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced:

respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the

vain proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and

a world of power would open to men:--

“Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great

ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with

greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made

so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum _impetu

inæstimabili_, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which

antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may

sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may

beat the air in the manner of a flying bird.”

Occam, Roger Bacon, these are the early precursors of a great movement

in Europe away from “Realism” towards reality. For a time the older

influences fought against the naturalism of the new Nominalists. In 1339

Occam’s books were put under a ban and Nominalism solemnly condemned. As

late as 1473 an attempt was made to bind teachers of Paris by an oath to

teach Realism.[388] It was only in the sixteenth century with the

printing of books and the increase of intelligence that the movement

from absolutism towards experiment became massive, and that one

investigator began to co-operate with another.

Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experimenting with

material things was on the increase, items of knowledge were being won

by men, but there was no inter-related advance. The work was done in a

detached, furtive, and inglorious manner. A tradition of isolated

investigation came into Europe from the Arabs and a considerable amount

of private and secretive research was carried on by the alchemists, for

whom modern writers are a little too apt with their contempt. These

alchemists were in close touch with the glass and metal workers and with

the herbalists and medicine-makers of the times; they pried into many

secrets of nature, but they were obsessed by “practical” ideas; they

sought not knowledge, but power; they wanted to find out how to

manufacture gold from cheaper materials, how to make men immortal by the

elixir of life, and such-like vulgar dreams. Incidentally in their

researches they learnt much about poisons, dyes, metallurgy, and the

like; they discovered various refractory substances, and worked their

way towards clear glass and so to lenses and optical instruments; but as

scientific men tell us continually, and as “practical” men still refuse

to learn, it is only when knowledge is sought for her own sake that she

gives rich and unexpected gifts in any abundance to her servants. The

world of to-day is still much more disposed to spend money on technical

research than on pure science. Half the men in our scientific

laboratories still dream of patents and secret processes. We live to-day

largely in the age of alchemists, for all our sneers at their memory.

The “business man” of to-day still thinks of research as a sort of

alchemy.

Closely associated with the alchemists were the astrologers, who were

also a “practical” race. They studied the stars--to tell fortunes. They

lacked that broader faith and understanding which induces men simply to

study the stars.

Not until the fifteenth century did the ideas which Roger Bacon first

expressed begin to produce their first-fruits in new knowledge and a

widening outlook. Then suddenly, as the sixteenth century dawned, and as

the world recovered from the storm of social trouble that had followed

the pestilences of the fourteenth century, Western Europe broke out into

a galaxy of names that outshine the utmost scientific reputations of the

best age of Greece. Nearly every nation contributed, the reader will

note, for science knows no nationality.

One of the earliest and most splendid in this constellation is the

Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a man with an almost

miraculous vision for reality. He was a naturalist, an anatomist, an

engineer, as well as a very great artist. He was the first modern to

realize the true nature of fossils,[389] he made note-books of

observations that still amaze us, he was convinced of the practicability

of mechanical flight. Another great name is that of Copernicus, a Pole

(1473-1543), who made the first clear analysis of the movements of the

heavenly bodies and showed that the earth moves round the sun. Tycho

Brahe (1546-1601), a Dane working at the university of Prague, rejected

this latter belief, but his observations of celestial movements were of

the utmost value to his successors, and especially to the German,

Kepler (1571-1630). Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the founder of the

science of dynamics. Before his time it was believed that a weight a

hundred times greater than another would fall a hundred times as fast.

Galileo denied this. Instead of arguing about it like a scholar and a

gentleman, he put it to the coarse test of experiment by dropping two

unequal weights from an upper gallery of the leaning tower of Pisa--to

the horror of all erudite men. He made what was almost the first

telescope, and he developed the astronomical views of Copernicus; but

the church, still struggling gallantly against the light, decided that

to believe that the earth was smaller and inferior to the sun made man

and Christianity of no account, and diminished the importance of the

Pope; so Galileo, under threats of dire punishment, when he was an old

man of sixty-nine, was made to recant this view and put the earth back

in its place as the immovable centre of the universe. He knelt before

ten cardinals in scarlet, an assembly august enough to overawe truth

itself, while he amended the creation he had disarranged. The story has

it that as he rose from his knees, after repeating his recantation, he

muttered, “_Eppur si muove_”--“it moves nevertheless.”

Newton (1642-1727) was born in the year of Galileo’s death. By his

discovery of the law of gravitation he completed the clear vision of the

starry universe that we have to-day. But Newton carries us into the

eighteenth century. He carries us too far for the present chapter. Among

the earlier names, that of Dr. Gilbert (1540-1603), of Colchester, is

pre-eminent. Roger Bacon had preached experiment, Gilbert was one of the

first to practise it. There can be little doubt that his work, which was

chiefly upon magnetism, helped to form the ideas of Francis Bacon, Lord

Verulam (1561-1626), Lord Chancellor to James I of England. This Francis

Bacon has been called the “Father of Experimental Philosophy,” but of

his share in the development of scientific work far too much has been

made.[390] He was, says Sir R. A. Gregory, “not the founder but the

apostle” of the scientific method. His greatest service to science was a

fantastic book, _The New Atlantis_. “In his _New Atlantis_, Francis

Bacon planned in somewhat fanciful language a palace of invention, a

great temple of science, where the pursuit of knowledge in all its

branches was to be organized on principles of the highest efficiency.”

From this Utopian dream arose the Royal Society of London, which

received a Royal Charter from Charles II of England in 1662. The

essential use and virtue of this society was and is _publication_. Its

formation marks a definite step from isolated inquiry towards

co-operative work, from the secret and solitary investigations of the

alchemist to the frank report and open discussion which is the life of

the modern scientific process. For the true scientific method is this:

to trust no statements without verification, to test all things as

rigorously as possible, to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies, to

give out one’s best modestly and plainly, serving no other end but

knowledge.

The long-slumbering science of anatomy was revived by Harvey

(1578-1657), who demonstrated the circulation of the blood.... Presently

the Dutchman, Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) brought the first crude microscope

to bear upon the hidden minutiæ of life.

These are but some of the brightest stars amidst that increasing

multitude of men who have from the fifteenth century to our own time,

with more and more collective energy and vigour, lit up our vision of

the universe, and increased our power over the conditions of our lives.

§ 7

We have dealt thus fully with the beginnings of science in the Middle

Ages because of its ultimate importance in human affairs. In the long

run, Roger Bacon is of more significance to mankind than any monarch of

his time. But the contemporary world, for the most part, knew nothing of

this smouldering activity in studies and lecture-rooms and alchemist’s

laboratories that was presently to alter all the conditions of life. The

church did indeed take notice of what was afoot, but only because of the

disregard of her conclusive decisions. She had decided that the earth

was the very centre of God’s creation, and that the Pope was the

divinely appointed ruler of the earth. Men’s ideas on these essential

points, she insisted, must not be disturbed by any contrary teaching. So

soon, however, as she had compelled Galileo to say that the world did

not move she was satisfied; she does not seem to have realized how

ominous it was for her that, after all, the earth did move.

Very great social as well as intellectual developments were in progress

in Western Europe throughout this period of the later Middle Ages. But

the human mind apprehends events far more vividly than changes; and men

for the most part, then as now, kept on in their own traditions in spite

of the shifting scene about them.

In an outline such as this it is impossible to crowd in the clustering

events of history that do not clearly show the main process of human

development, however bright and picturesque they may be. We have to

record the steady growth of towns and cities, the reviving power of

trade and money, the gradual re-establishment of law and custom, the

extension of security, the supersession of private warfare that went on

in Western Europe in the period between the First Crusade and the

sixteenth century. Of much that looms large in our national histories we

cannot tell anything. We have no space for the story of the repeated

attempts of the English kings to conquer Scotland and set themselves up

as kings of France, nor of how the Norman English established themselves

insecurely in Ireland (twelfth century), and how Wales was linked to the

English crown (1282). All through the Middle Ages the struggle of

England with Scotland and France was in progress; there were times when

it seemed that Scotland was finally subjugated and when the English king

held far more land in France than its titular sovereign. In the English

histories this struggle with France is too often represented as a

single-handed and almost successful attempt to conquer France. In

reality it was a joint enterprise undertaken in concert with the

powerful French vassal state of Burgundy to conquer and divide the

patrimony of Hugh Capet.[391] Of the English rout by the Scotch at

Bannockburn (1314), and of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, the

Scottish national heroes, of the battles of Crecy (1346) and Poitiers

(1356) and Agincourt (1415) in France, which shine like stars in the

English imagination, little battles in which sturdy bowmen through some

sunny hours made a great havoc among French knights in armour, of the

Black Prince and Henry V of England, and of how a peasant girl, Joan of

Arc, the Maid of Orleans, drove the English out of her country again

(1429-1430), this history relates nothing. For every country has such

cherished national events. They are the ornamental tapestry of history,

and no part of the building. Rajputana or Poland, Russia, Spain, Persia,

and China can all match or outdo the utmost romance of western Europe,

with equally adventurous knights and equally valiant princesses and

equally stout fights against the odds. Nor can we tell how Louis XI of

France (1461-1483), the son of Joan of Arc’s Charles VII, brought

Burgundy to heel and laid the foundations of a centralized French

monarchy. It signifies more that in the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries, gunpowder, that Mongol gift, came to Europe so that the kings

(Louis XI included) and the law, relying upon the support of the growing

towns, were able to batter down the castles of the half-independent

robber knights and barons of the earlier Middle Ages and consolidate a

more centralized power. The fighting nobles and knights of the barbaric

period disappear slowly from history during these centuries; the

Crusades consumed them, such dynastic wars as the English Wars of the

Roses killed them off, the arrows from the English long-bow pierced them

and stuck out a yard behind, infantry so armed swept them from the

stricken field; they became reconciled to trade and changed their

nature. They disappeared in everything but a titular sense from the west

and south of Europe before they disappeared from Germany. The knight in

Germany remained a professional fighting man into the sixteenth century.

Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries in western Europe, and

particularly in France and England, there sprang up like flowers a

multitude of very distinctive and beautiful buildings, cathedrals,

abbeys, and the like, the Gothic architecture. This lovely efflorescence

marks the appearance of a body of craftsmen closely linked in its

beginnings to the church. In Italy and Spain too the world was

beginning to build freely and beautifully again. At first it was the

wealth of the church that provided most of these buildings; then kings

and merchants also began to build.

From the twelfth century onward, with the increase of trade, there was a

great revival of town life throughout Europe. Prominent among these

towns were Venice, with its dependents Ragusa and Corfu, Genoa, Verona,

Bologna, Pisa, Florence, Naples, Milan, Marseilles, Lisbon, Barcelona,

Narbonne, Tours, Orleans, Bordeaux, Paris, Ghent, Bruges, Boulogne,

London, Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Dover, Antwerp, Hamburg, Bremen,

Cologne, Mayence, Nuremberg, Munich, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Breslau,

Stettin, Dantzig, Königsberg, Riga, Pskof, Novgorod, Wisby, and Bergen.

“A West German town, between 1400 and 1500,[392] embodied all the

achievements of progress at that time, although from a modern standpoint

much seems wanting.... The streets were mostly narrow and irregularly

built, the houses chiefly of wood, while almost every burgher kept his

cattle in the house, and the herd of swine which was driven every

morning by the town herdsman to the pasture-ground formed an inevitable

part of city life.[393] In Frankfort-on-Main it was unlawful after 1481

to keep swine in the Altstadt, but in the Neustadt and in Sachsenhausen

this custom remained as a matter of course. It was only in 1645, after a

corresponding attempt in 1556 had failed, that the swine-pens in the

inner town were pulled down at Leipzig. The rich burghers, who

occasionally took part in the great trading companies, were

conspicuously wealthy landowners and had extensive courtyards with large

barns inside the town walls. The most opulent of them owned those

splendid patrician houses which we still admire even to-day. But even in

the older towns most houses of the fifteenth century have disappeared;

only here and there a building with open timber-work and over-hanging

storeys, as in Bacharach or Miltenburg, reminds us of the style of

architecture then customary in the houses of burghers. The great bulk

of the inferior population, who lived on mendicancy, or got a livelihood

by the exercise of the inferior industries, inhabited squalid hovels

outside the town; the town wall was often the only support for these

wretched buildings. The internal fittings of the houses, even amongst

the wealthy population, were very defective according to modern ideas;

the Gothic style was as little suitable for the petty details of objects

of luxury as it was splendidly adapted for the building of churches and

town halls. The influence of the Renaissance added much to the comfort

of the house.

“The fourteenth and fifteenth century saw the building of numerous

Gothic town churches and town halls throughout Europe which still in

many cases serve their original purpose. The power and prosperity of the

towns find their best expression in these and in the fortifications with

their strong towers and gateways. Every picture of a town of the

sixteenth or later centuries shows conspicuously these latter erections

for the protection and honour of the town. The town did many things

which in our time are done by the State. Social problems were taken up

by town administration or the corresponding municipal organization. The

regulation of trade was the concern of the guilds in agreement with the

council, the care of the poor belonged to the church, while the council

looked after the protection of the town walls and the very necessary

fire brigades. The council, mindful of its social duties, superintended

the filling of the municipal granaries, in order to have supplies in

years of scarcity. Such store-houses were erected in almost every town

during the fifteenth century. Tariffs of prices for the sale of all

wares, high enough to enable every artisan to make a good livelihood,

and to give the purchaser a guarantee for the quality of the wares, were

maintained. The town was also the chief capitalist; as a seller of

annuities on lives and inheritances it was a banker and enjoyed

unlimited credit. In return it obtained means for the construction of

fortifications or for such occasions as the acquisition of sovereign

rights from the hand of an impecunious prince.”

For the most part these European towns were independent or

quasi-independent aristocratic republics. Most admitted a vague

overlordship on the part of the church, or of the emperor or of a king.

Others were parts of kingdoms, or even the capitals of dukes or kings.

In such cases their internal freedom was maintained by a royal or

imperial charter. In England the Royal City of Westminster on the Thames

stood cheek by jowl with the walled city of London, into which the King

came only with ceremony and permission. The entirely free Venetian

republic ruled an empire of dependent islands and trading ports, rather

after the fashion of the Athenian republic. Genoa also stood alone. The

Germanic towns of the Baltic and North Sea from Riga to Middelburg in

Holland, Dortmund, and Cologne were loosely allied in a confederation,

the confederation of the Hansa towns, under the leadership of Hamburg,

Bremen, and Lubeck, a confederation which was still more loosely

attached to the empire. This confederation, which included over seventy

towns in all, and which had dépôts in Novgorod, Bergen, London, and

Bruges, did much to keep the northern seas clean of piracy, that curse

of the Mediterranean and of the Eastern seas. The Eastern Empire

throughout its last phase, from the Ottoman conquest of its European

hinterland in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century until its fall

in 1453, was practically only the trading town of Constantinople, a town

state like Genoa or Venice, except that it was encumbered by a corrupt

imperial court.

[Illustration: Principal EUROPEAN TRADE ROUTES of the 14th Cent'y]

The fullest and most splendid developments of this city life of the

later Middle Ages occurred in Italy. After the end of the Hohenstaufen

line in the thirteenth century, the hold of the Holy Roman Empire upon

North and Central Italy weakened, although, as we shall tell, German

Emperors were still crowned as kings and emperors in Italy up to the

time of Charles V (_circ._ 1530). There arose a number of

quasi-independent city states to the north of Rome, the papal capital.

South Italy and Sicily, however, remained under foreign dominion. Genoa

and her rival, Venice, were the great trading seaports of this time;

their noble palaces, their lordly paintings, still win our admiration.

Milan, at the foot of the St. Gothard pass, revived to wealth and power.

Inland was Florence, a trading and financial centre which, under the

almost monarchical rule of the Medici family in the fifteenth century,

enjoyed a second “Periclean age.” But already before the time of these

cultivated Medici “bosses,” Florence had produced much beautiful art.

Giotto’s tower (Giotto, born 1266, died 1337) and the glorious Duomo (by

Brunellesco, born 1377, died 1446) already existed. Towards the end of

the fourteenth century Florence became the centre of the rediscovery,

restoration, and imitation of antique art (the “Renaissance” in its

narrower sense). Artistic productions, unlike philosophical thought and

scientific discovery, are the ornaments and expression rather than the

creative substance of history, and here we cannot attempt to trace the

development of the art of Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Donatello (died

1466), Leonardo da Vinci (died 1519), Michelangelo (1475-1564), and

Raphael (died 1520). Of the scientific speculation of Leonardo we have

already had occasion to speak.

§ 8

In 1453, as we have related, Constantinople fell. Throughout the next

century the Turkish pressure upon Europe was heavy and continuous. The

boundary line between Mongol and Aryan, which had lain somewhere east of

the Pamirs in the days of Pericles, had receded now to Hungary.

Constantinople had long been a mere island of Christians in a Turk-ruled

Balkan Peninsula. Its fall did much to interrupt the trade with the

East.

Of the two rival cities of the Mediterranean, Venice was generally on

much better terms with the Turks than Genoa. Every intelligent Genoese

sailor fretted at the trading monopoly of Venice, and tried to invent

some way of getting through it or round it. And there were now new

peoples taking to the sea trade, and disposed to look for new ways to

the old markets because the ancient routes were closed to them. The

Portuguese, for example, were developing an Atlantic coasting trade. The

Atlantic was waking up again after a vast period of neglect that dated

from the Roman murder of Carthage. It is rather a delicate matter to

decide whether the western European was pushing out into the Atlantic or

whether he was being pushed out into it by the Turk, who lorded it in

the Mediterranean until the Battle of Lepanto (1571). The Venetian and

Genoese ships were creeping round to Antwerp, and the Hansa town seamen

were coming south and extending their range. And there were

considerable developments of seamanship and shipbuilding in progress.

The Mediterranean, as we have noted (chapter xvii) is a sea for galleys

and coasting. But upon the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea winds are

more prevalent, seas run higher, the shore is often a danger rather than

a refuge. The high seas called for the sailing ship, and in the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it appears, keeping its course by the

compass and the stars.

By the thirteenth century the Hansa merchants were already sailing

regularly from Bergen across the grey cold seas to the Northmen in

Iceland. In Iceland men knew of Greenland, and adventurous voyagers had

long ago found a further land beyond, Vinland, where the climate was

pleasant and where men could settle if they chose to cut themselves off

from the rest of human kind. This Vinland was either Nova Scotia or,

what is more probable, New England.

All over Europe in the fifteenth century merchants and sailors were

speculating about new ways to the East. The Portuguese, unaware that

Pharaoh Necho had solved the problem ages ago, were asking whether it

was not possible to go round to India by the coast of Africa. Their

ships followed in the course that Hanno took to Cape Verde (1445). They

put out to sea to the west and found the Canary Isles, Madeira, and the

Azores.[394] That was a fairly long stride across the Atlantic. In 1486

a Portuguese, Diaz, reported that he had rounded the south of Africa....

A certain Genoese, Christopher Columbus, began to think more and more of

what is to us a very obvious and natural enterprise, but which strained

the imagination of the fifteenth century to the utmost, a voyage due

west across the Atlantic. At that time nobody knew of the existence of

America as a separate continent. Columbus knew that the world was a

sphere, but he under-estimated its size; the travels of Marco Polo had

given him an exaggerated idea of the extent of Asia, and he supposed

therefore that Japan, with its reputation for a great wealth of gold,

lay across the Atlantic in about the position of Mexico. He had made

various voyages in the Atlantic; he had been to Iceland and perhaps

heard of Vinland, which must have greatly encouraged these ideas of his,

and this project of sailing into the sunset became the ruling purpose of

his life. He was a penniless man, some accounts say he was a bankrupt,

and his only way of securing a ship was to get someone to entrust him

with a command. He went first to King John II of Portugal, who listened

to him, made difficulties, and then arranged for an expedition to start

without his knowledge, a purely Portuguese expedition. This highly

diplomatic attempt to steal a march on an original man failed, as it

deserved to fail; the crew became mutinous, the captain lost heart and

returned (1483). Columbus then went to the Court of Spain.

At first he could get no ship and no powers. Spain was assailing

Granada, the last foothold of the Moslems in western Europe. Most of

Spain had been recovered by the Christians between the eleventh and the

thirteenth century; then had come a pause; and now all Spain, united by

the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, was setting

itself to the completion of the Christian conquest. Despairing of

Spanish help, Columbus sent his brother Bartholomew to Henry VII of

England, but the adventure did not attract that canny monarch. Finally

in 1492 Granada fell, and then, helped by some merchants of the town of

Palos, Columbus got his ships, three ships, of which only one, the

_Santa Maria_, of 100 tons burthen, was decked. The two other were open

boats of half that tonnage.

The little expedition--it numbered altogether eighty-eight men!--went

south to the Canaries, and then stood out across the unknown seas, in

beautiful weather and with a helpful wind.

The story of that momentous voyage of two months and nine days must be

read in detail to be appreciated. The crew was full of doubts and fears;

they might, they feared, sail on for ever. They were comforted by seeing

some birds, and later on by finding a pole worked with tools, and a

branch with strange berries. At ten o’clock, on the night of October

11th, 1492, Columbus saw a light ahead; the next morning land was

sighted, and, while the day was still young, Columbus landed on the

shores of the new world, richly apparelled and bearing the royal banner

of Spain....

Early in 1493 Columbus returned to Europe. He brought gold, cotton,

strange beasts and birds, and two wild-eyed painted Indians to be

baptized. He had not found Japan, it was thought, but India. The islands

he had found were called, therefore the West Indies. The same year he

sailed again with a great expedition of seventeen ships and fifteen

thousand men, with the express permission of the Pope to take possession

of these new lands for the Spanish crown....

We cannot tell of his experiences as Governor of this Spanish colony,

nor how he was superseded and put in chains. In a little while a swarm

of Spanish adventurers were exploring the new lands. But it is

interesting to note that Columbus died ignorant of the fact that he had

discovered a new continent. He believed to the day of his death that he

had sailed round the world to Asia.

The news of his discoveries caused a great excitement throughout western

Europe. It spurred the Portuguese to fresh attempts to reach India by

the South African route. In 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon to

Zanzibar, and thence, with an Arab pilot, he struck across the Indian

Ocean to Calicut in India. In 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java

and the Moluccas. In 1519 a Portuguese sailor, Magellan, in the

employment of the Spanish King, coasted to the south of South America,

passed through the dark and forbidding “Strait of Magellan,” and so came

into the Pacific Ocean, which had already been sighted by Spanish

explorers who had crossed the Isthmus of Panama.

Magellan’s expedition continued across the Pacific Ocean westward. This

was a far more heroic voyage than that of Columbus; for _eight and

ninety days_ Magellan sailed unflinchingly over that vast, empty ocean,

sighting nothing but two little desert islands. The crews were rotten

with scurvy; there was little water and that bad, and putrid biscuit to

eat. Rats were hunted eagerly; cowhide was gnawed and sawdust devoured

to stay the pangs of hunger. In this state the expedition reached the

Ladrones. They discovered the Philippines, and here Magellan was killed

in a fight with the natives. Several other captains were murdered. Five

ships had started with Magellan in August, 1519, and two hundred and

eighty men; in July, 1522, the _Vittoria_, with a remnant of one and

thirty men aboard, returned up the Atlantic to her anchorage near the

Mole of Seville, in the river Guadalquivir--the first ship that ever

circumnavigated this planet.[395]

The English and French and Dutch and the sailors of the Hansa towns came

rather later into this new adventure of exploration. They had not the

same keen interest in the eastern trade. And when they did come in,

their first efforts were directed to sailing round the north of America

as Magellan had sailed round the south, and to sailing round the north

of Asia as Vasco da Gama had sailed round the south of Africa. Both

these enterprises were doomed to failure by the nature of things. Both

in America and the East, Spain and Portugal had half a century’s start

of England and France and Holland. And Germany never started. The King

of Spain was Emperor of Germany in those crucial years, and the Pope had

given the monopoly of America to Spain, and not simply to Spain, but to

the kingdom of Castile. This must have restrained both Germany and

Holland at first from American adventures. The Hansa towns were

quasi-independent; they had no monarch behind them to support them, and

no unity among themselves for so big an enterprise as oceanic

exploration. It was the misfortune of Germany, and perhaps of the world,

that, as we will presently tell, a storm of warfare exhausted her when

all the Western powers were going to this newly opened school of trade

and administration upon the high seas.

Slowly throughout the sixteenth century the immense good fortune of

Castile unfolded itself before the dazzled eyes of Europe. She had found

a new world, abounding in gold and silver and wonderful possibilities of

settlement. It was all hers, because the Pope had said so. The Court of

Rome, in an access of magnificence, had divided this new world of

strange lands, which was now opening out to the European imagination,

between the Spanish, who were to have everything west of a line 370

leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, and the Portuguese, to whom

everything east of this line was given.

At first the only people encountered by the Spaniards in America were

savages of a Mongoloid type. Many of these savages were cannibals. It is

a misfortune for science that the first Europeans to reach America were

these rather incurious Spaniards, without any scientific passion,

thirsty for gold, and full of the blind bigotry of a recent religious

war. They made few intelligent observations of the native methods and

ideas of these primordial people. They slaughtered them, they robbed

them, they enslaved them, and baptized them; but they made small note of

the customs and motives that changed and vanished under their assault.

They were as destructive and reckless as the British in Tasmania, who

shot the last Palæolithic men at sight, and put out poisoned meat for

them to find.

Great areas of the American interior were prairie land, whose nomadic

tribes subsisted upon vast herds of the now practically extinct bison.

In their manner of life, in their painted garments and their free use of

paint, in their general physical characters, these prairie Indians

showed remarkable resemblances to the Later Palæolithic men of the

Solutrian age in Europe. But they had no horses. They seem to have made

no very great advance from that primordial state, which was probably the

state in which their ancestors had reached America. They had, however, a

knowledge of metals, and most notably a free use of native copper, but

no knowledge of iron. As the Spaniards penetrated into the continent,

they found and they attacked, plundered, and destroyed two separate

civilized systems that had developed in America, perhaps quite

independently of the civilized systems of the old world. One of them was

the Aztec civilization of Mexico; the other, that of Peru. They had

arisen out of the heliolithic sub-civilization that had drifted across

the Pacific from its region of origin round and about the Mediterranean.

We have already noted one or two points of interest in these unique

developments. Along their own lines these civilized peoples had reached

to a state of affairs roughly parallel with the culture of pre-dynastic

Egypt or the early Sumerian cities. Before the Aztecs and the Peruvians

there had been still earlier civilized beginnings which had either been

destroyed by their successors, or which had failed and relapsed of their

own accord.

The Aztecs seem to have been a conquering, less civilized people,

dominating a more civilized community, as the Aryans dominated Greece

and North India. Their religion was a primitive, complex, and cruel

system, in which human sacrifices and ceremonial cannibalism played a

large part. Their minds were haunted by the idea of sin and the need for

bloody propitiations.[396]

The Aztec civilization was destroyed by an expedition under Cortez. He

had eleven ships, four hundred Europeans, two hundred Indians, sixteen

horses, and fourteen guns. But in Yucatan he picked up a stray Spaniard

who had been a captive with the Indians for some years, and who had more

or less learnt various Indian languages, and knew that the Aztec rule

was deeply resented by many of its subjects. It was in alliance with

these that Cortez advanced over the mountains into the valley of Mexico,

(1519)[397]. How he entered Mexico, how its monarch, Montezuma, was

killed by his own people for favouring the Spaniards, how Cortez was

besieged in Mexico, and escaped with the loss of his guns and horses,

and how after a terrible retreat to the coast he was able to return and

subjugate the whole land, is a romantic and picturesque story which we

cannot even attempt to tell here. The population of Mexico to this day

is largely of native blood, but Spanish has replaced the native

languages, and such culture as exists is Catholic and Spanish.

[Illustration: Map of the World to show the CHIEF VOYAGES of EXPLORATION

(to 1522)]

[Illustration: MEXICO and PERU]

The still more curious Peruvian state fell a victim to another

adventurer, Pizarro. He sailed from the Isthmus of Panama in 1530, with

an expedition of a hundred and sixty-eight Spaniards. Like Cortez in

Mexico, he availed himself of the native dissensions to secure

possession of the doomed state. Like Cortez, too, who had made a captive

and tool of Montezuma, he seized the Inca of Peru by treachery, and

attempted to rule in his name. Here again we cannot do justice to the

tangle of subsequent events, the ill-planned insurrections of the

natives, the arrival of Spanish reinforcements from Mexico, and the

reduction of the state to a Spanish province. Nor can we tell much more

of the swift spread of Spanish adventurers over the rest of America,

outside the Portuguese reservation of Brazil. To begin with, each story

is nearly always a story of adventurers and of cruelty and loot. The

Spaniards ill-treated the natives, they quarrelled among themselves, the

law and order of Spain were months and years away from them; it was only

very slowly that the phase of violence and conquest passed into a phase

of government and settlement. But long before there was much order in

America, a steady stream of gold and silver began to flow across the

Atlantic to the Spanish government and people.

After the first violent treasure hunt came plantation and the working of

mines. With that arose the earliest labour difficulty in the new world.

At first the Indians were enslaved with much brutality and injustice;

but to the honour of the Spaniards this did not go uncriticized. The

natives found champions, and very valiant champions, in the Dominican

Order and in a secular priest Las Casas, who was for a time a planter

and slave-owner in Cuba until his conscience smote him. An importation

of negro slaves from West Africa also began quite early in the sixteenth

century. After some retrogression, Mexico, Brazil, and Spanish South

America began to develop into great slave-holding, wealth-producing

lands....

We cannot tell here, as we would like to do, of the fine civilizing work

done in South America, and more especially among the natives, by the

Franciscans, and presently by the Jesuits, who came into America in the

latter half of the sixteenth century (after 1549)....[398]

So it was that Spain rose to a temporary power and prominence in the

world’s affairs. It was a very sudden and very memorable rise. From the

eleventh century this infertile and corrugated peninsula had been

divided against itself, its Christian population had sustained a

perpetual conflict with the Moors; then by what seems like an accident

it achieved unity just in time to reap the first harvest of benefit from

the discovery of America. Before that time Spain had always been a poor

country; it is a poor country to-day, almost its only wealth lies in its

mines. For a century, however, through its monopoly of the gold and

silver of America, it dominated the world. The east and centre of Europe

were still overshadowed by the Turk and Mongol; the discovery of America

was itself a consequence of the Turkish conquests; very largely through

the Mongolian inventions of compass and paper, and under the stimulus of

travel in Asia and of the growing knowledge of eastern Asiatic wealth

and civilization, came this astonishing blazing up of the mental,

physical, and social energies of the “Atlantic fringe.” For close in the

wake of Portugal and Spain came France and England, and presently

Holland, each in its turn taking up the rôle of expansion and empire

overseas. The centre of interest for European history which once lay in

the Levant shifts now from the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea to the

Atlantic. For some centuries the Turkish Empire and Central Asia and

China are relatively neglected by the limelight of the European

historian. Nevertheless, these central regions of the world remain

central, and their welfare and participation is necessary to the

permanent peace of mankind.

§ 9

And now let us consider the political consequences of this vast release

and expansion of European ideas in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries with the new development of science, the exploration of the

world, the great dissemination of knowledge through paper and printing,

and the spread of a new craving for freedom and equality. How was it

affecting the mentality of the courts and kings that directed the formal

affairs of mankind? We have already shown how the hold of the Catholic

church upon the consciences of men was weakening at this time. Only the

Spaniards, fresh from a long and finally successful religious war

against Islam, had any great enthusiasm left for the church. The Turkish

conquests and the expansion of the known world robbed the Roman Empire

of its former prestige of universality. The old mental and moral

framework of Europe was breaking up. What was happening to the dukes,

princes, and kings of the old dispensation during this age of change?

In England, as we shall tell later, very subtle and interesting

tendencies were leading towards a new method in government, the method

of parliament, that was to spread later on over nearly all the world.

But of these tendencies the world at large was as yet practically

unconscious in the sixteenth century.

Few monarchs have left us intimate diaries; to be a monarch and to be

frank are incompatible feats; monarchy is itself necessarily a pose. The

historian is obliged to speculate about the contents of the head that

wears a crown as best he can. No doubt regal psychology has varied with

the ages. We have, however, the writings of a very able man of this

period who set himself to study and expound the arts of kingcraft as

they were understood in the later fifteenth century. This was the

celebrated Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). He was of good

birth and reasonable fortune, and he had entered the public employment

of the republic by the time he was twenty-five. For eighteen years he

was in the Florentine diplomatic service; he was engaged upon a number

of embassies, and in 1500 he was sent to France to deal with the French

king. From 1502 to 1512 he was the right-hand man of the gonfalonier

(the life president) of Florence, Soderini. Machiavelli reorganized the

Florentine army, wrote speeches for the gonfalonier, was indeed the

ruling intelligence in Florentine affairs. When Soderini, who had leant

upon the French, was overthrown by the Medici family whom the Spanish

supported, Machiavelli, though he tried to transfer his services to the

victors, was tortured on the rack and expelled. He took up his quarters

in a villa near San Casciano, twelve miles or so from Florence, and

there entertained himself partly by collecting and writing salacious

stories to a friend in Rome, and partly by writing books about Italian

politics in which he could no longer play a part. Just as we owe Marco

Polo’s book of travels to his imprisonment, so we owe Machiavelli’s

_Prince_, his _Florentine History_, and _The Art of War_ to his downfall

and the boredom of San Casciano.

The enduring value of these books lies in the clear idea they give us of

the quality and limitations of the ruling minds of this age. Their

atmosphere was his atmosphere. If he brought an exceptionally keen

intelligence to their business, that merely throws it into a brighter

light.

His susceptible mind had been greatly impressed by the cunning, cruelty,

audacity, and ambition of Cæsar Borgia, the Duke of Valentino, in whose

camp he had spent some months as an envoy. In his _Prince_ he idealized

this dazzling person. Cæsar Borgia (1476-1507), the reader must

understand, was the son of Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia

(1492-1503). The reader will perhaps be startled at the idea of a Pope

having a son, but this, we must remember, was a pre-reformation Pope.

The Papacy at this time was in a mood of moral relaxation, and though

Alexander was, as a priest, pledged to live unmarried, this did not

hinder him from living openly with a sort of unmarried wife, and

devoting the resources of Christendom to the advancement of his family.

Cæsar was a youth of spirit even for the times in which he lived; he had

early caused his elder brother to be murdered, and also the husband of

his sister, Lucrezia. He had indeed betrayed and murdered a number of

people. With his father’s assistance he had become duke of a wide area

of Central Italy when Machiavelli visited him. He had shown little or no

military ability, but considerable dexterity and administrative power.

His magnificence was of the most temporary sort. When presently his

father died, it collapsed like a pricked bladder. Its unsoundness was

not evident to Machiavelli.[399] Our chief interest in Cæsar Borgia is

that he realized Machiavelli’s highest ideals of a superb and successful

prince.

Much has been written to show that Machiavelli had wide and noble

intentions behind his political writings, but all such attempts to

ennoble him will leave the sceptical reader who insists on reading the

lines instead of reading imaginary things between the lines of

Machiavelli’s work, cold towards him. This man manifestly had no belief

in any righteousness at all, no belief in a God ruling over the world or

in a God in men’s hearts, no understanding of the power of conscience in

men. Not for him were Utopian visions of world-wide human order, or

attempts to realize the _City of God_. Such things he did not want. It

seemed to him that to get power, to gratify one’s desires and

sensibilities and hates, to swagger triumphantly in the world, must be

the crown of human desire. Only a prince could fully realize such a

life. Some streak of timidity or his sense of the poorness of his

personal claims had evidently made him abandon such dreams for himself;

but at least he might hope to serve a prince, to live close to the

glory, to share the plunder and the lust and the gratified malice. He

might even make himself indispensable! He set himself, therefore, to

become an “expert” in prince-craft. He assisted Soderini to fail. When

he was racked and rejected by the Medicis, and had no further hopes of

being even a successful court parasite, he wrote these handbooks of

cunning to show what a clever servant some prince had lost. His ruling

thought, his great contribution to political literature, was that the

moral obligations upon ordinary men cannot bind princes.[400]

There is a disposition to ascribe the virtue of patriotism to

Machiavelli because he suggested that Italy, which was weak and

divided--she had been invaded by the Turks and saved from conquest only

by the death of the Sultan Muhammad, and she was being fought over by

the French and Spanish as though she was something inanimate--might be

united and strong; but he saw in that possibility only a great

opportunity for a prince. And he advocated a national army only because

he saw the Italian method of carrying on war by hiring bands of foreign

mercenaries was a hopeless one. At any time such troops might go over to

a better paymaster or decide to plunder the state they protected. He had

been deeply impressed by the victories of the Swiss over the Milanese,

but he never fathomed the secret of the free spirit that made those

victories possible. The Florentine militia he created was a complete

failure. He was a man born blind to the qualities that make peoples free

and nations great.

Yet this morally blind man was living in a little world of morally blind

men. It is clear that his style of thought was the style of thought of

the court of his time. Behind the princes of the new states that had

grown up out of the wreckage of the empire and the failure of the

Church, there were everywhere chancellors and secretaries and trusted

ministers of the Machiavellian type. Cromwell, for instance, the

minister of Henry VIII of England after his breach with Rome, regarded

Machiavelli’s _Prince_ as the quintessence of political wisdom. When

the princes were themselves sufficiently clever they too were

Machiavellian. They were scheming to outdo one another, to rob weaker

contemporaries, to destroy rivals, so that they might for a brief

interval swagger. They had little or no vision of any scheme of human

destinies greater than this game they played against one another.

[Illustration: SWITZERLAND, _showing principal Passes and Routes_]

§ 10

It is interesting to note that this Swiss infantry which had so

impressed Machiavelli was no part of the princely system of Europe. At

the very centre of the European system there had arisen a little

confederation of free states, the Swiss Confederation, which after some

centuries of nominal adhesion to the Holy Roman Empire became frankly

republican in 1499. As early as the thirteenth century, the peasant

farmers of three valleys round about the Lake of Lucerne took it into

their heads that they would dispense with an overlord and manage their

own affairs in their own fashion. Their chief trouble came from the

claims of a noble family of the Aar Valley, the Habsburg family. In 1245

the men of Schwyz burnt the castle of New Habsburg which had been set up

near Lucerne to overawe them; its ruins are still to be seen there.

This Habsburg family was a growing and acquisitive one; it had lands and

possessions throughout Germany; and in 1273, after the extinction of the

Hohenstaufen house, Rudolf of Habsburg was elected Emperor of Germany, a

distinction that became at last practically hereditary in his family.

None the less, the men of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden did not mean to

be ruled by any Habsburg; they formed an Everlasting League in 1291, and

they held their own among the mountains from that time onward to this

day, first as free members of the empire and then as an absolutely

independent confederation. Of the heroic legend of William Tell we have

no space to tell here, nor have we room in which to trace the gradual

extension of the confederation to its present boundaries. Romansh,

Italian, and French-speaking valleys were presently added to this

valiant little republican group. The red cross flag of Geneva has become

the symbol of international humanity in the midst of warfare. The bright

and thriving cities of Switzerland have been a refuge for free men from

a score of tyrannies.

§ 11A

Most of the figures that stand out in history, do so through some

exceptional personal quality, good or bad, that makes them more

significant than their fellows. But there was born at Ghent in Belgium

in 1500 a man of commonplace abilities and melancholy temperament, the

son of a mentally defective mother who had been married for reasons of

state, who was, through no fault of his own, to become the focus of the

accumulating stresses of Europe. The historian must give him a quite

unmerited and accidental prominence side by side with such marked

individualities as Alexander and Charlemagne and Frederick II. This was

the Emperor Charles V. For a time he had an air of being the greatest

monarch in Europe since Charlemagne. Both he and his illusory greatness

were the results of the matrimonial statecraft of his grandfather, the

Emperor Maximilian I (born 1459, died 1519).

Some families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world

power; the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with

the inheritance of the Habsburgs, Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and

other districts; he married--the lady’s name scarcely matters to us--the

Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him after his

first wife’s death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he tried

unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in succession to his

father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy of Milan. Finally

he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of Ferdinand and

Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus, who not only reigned

over a freshly united Spain, and over Sardinia and the kingdom of the

Two Sicilies, but by virtue of the papal gifts to Castile, over all

America west of Brazil. So it was that Charles, his grandson, inherited

most of the American continent and between a third and a half of what

the Turks had left of Europe. The father of Charles died in 1506, and

Maximilian did his best to secure his grandson’s election to the

imperial throne.

Charles succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506; he became practically king

of the Spanish dominions, his mother being imbecile, when his

grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516; and his grandfather Maximilian dying

in 1519, he was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively

tender age of twenty.

[Illustration: EUROPE in the time of CHARLES V.]

His election as Emperor was opposed by the young and brilliant French

King, Francis I, who had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the

age of twenty-one. The candidature of Francis was supported by Leo X

(1513), who also requires from us the epithet brilliant. It was indeed

an age of brilliant monarchs. It was the age of Baber in India

(1526-1530) and Suleiman in Turkey (1520). Both Leo and Francis dreaded

the concentration of so much power in the hands of one man as the

election of Charles threatened. The only other monarch who seemed to

matter in Europe was Henry VIII, who had become King of England in 1509

at the age of eighteen. He also offered himself as a candidate for the

empire, and the imaginative English reader may amuse himself by

working out the possible consequences of such an election. There was

much scope for diplomacy in this triangle of kings. Charles on his way

from Spain to Germany visited England and secured the support of Henry

against Francis by bribing his minister, Cardinal Wolsey. Henry also

made a great parade of friendship with Francis, there was feasting,

tournaments, and suchlike antiquated gallantries in France, in a courtly

picnic known to historians as the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520).

Knighthood was becoming a picturesque affectation in the sixteenth

century. The Emperor Maximilian I is still called “the last of the

knights”; by German historians.

The election of Charles was secured, it is to be noted, by a vast amount

of bribery. He had as his chief supporters and creditors the great

German business house of the Fuggers. That large treatment of money and

credit which we call finance, which had gone out of European political

life with the collapse of the Roman Empire, was now coming back to

power. This appearance of the Fuggers, whose houses and palaces outshone

those of the emperors, marks the upward movement of forces that had

begun two or three centuries earlier in Cahors in France and in Florence

and other Italian towns. Money, public debts, and social unrest and

discontent, re-enter upon the miniature stage of this _Outline_. Charles

V was not so much a Habsburg as a Fugger emperor.

For a time this fair, not very intelligent-looking young man with the

thick upper lip and long, clumsy chin--features which still afflict his

descendants--was largely a puppet in the hands of his ministers. Able

servants after the order of Machiavelli guided him at first in the arts

of kingship. Then in a slow but effectual way he began to assert

himself. He was confronted at the very outset of his reign in Germany

with the perplexing dissensions of Christendom. The revolt against the

papal rule which had been going on since the days of Huss and Wycliffe

had been recently exasperated by a new and unusually cynical selling of

indulgences to raise money for the completion of St. Peter’s at Rome. A

monk named Luther, who had been consecrated as a priest, who had taken

to reading the Bible, and who, while visiting Rome on the business of

his order, had been much shocked by the levity and worldly splendour of

the Papacy, had come forward against these papal expedients at

Wittenberg (1517), offering disputation and propounding certain theses.

An important controversy ensued. At first Luther carried on this

controversy in Latin, but presently took to German, and speedily had the

people in a ferment. Charles found this dispute raging when he came from

Spain to Germany. He summoned an assembly or “diet” of the empire at

Worms on the Rhine. To this, Luther, who had been asked to recant his

views by Pope Leo X, and who had refused to do so, was summoned. He

came, and, entirely in the spirit of Huss, refused to recant unless he

was convinced of his error by logical argument or the authority of

Scripture. But his protectors among the princes were too powerful for

him to suffer the fate of John Huss.

[Illustration: Luther

(after Cranach)]

Here was a perplexing situation for the young Emperor. There is reason

to suppose that he was inclined at first to support Luther against the

Pope. Leo X had opposed the election of Charles, and was friendly with

his rival, Francis I. But Charles V was not a good Machiavellian, and he

had acquired in Spain a considerable religious sincerity. He decided

against Luther. Many of the German princes, and especially the Elector

of Saxony, sided with the reformer. Luther went into hiding under the

protection of the Saxon Elector, and Charles found himself in the

presence of the opening rift that was to split Christendom into two

contending camps.

Close upon these disturbances, and probably connected with them, came a

widespread peasants’ revolt throughout Germany. This outbreak frightened

Luther very effectually. He was shocked by its excesses, and from that

time forth the Reformation he advocated ceased to be a Reformation

according to the people and became a Reformation according to the

princes. He lost his confidence in that free judgment for which he had

stood up so manfully.

[Illustration: Francis I]

Meanwhile Charles realized that his great empire was in very serious

danger both from the west and from the east. On the west of him was his

spirited rival, Francis I; to the east was the Turk in Hungary, in

alliance with Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute from

the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain at his

disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective support in

money from Germany. His grandfather had developed a German infantry on

the Swiss model, very much upon the lines expounded in Machiavelli’s

_Art of War_, but these troops had to be paid and his imperial subsidies

had to be supplemented by unsecured borrowings, which were finally to

bring his supporters, the Fuggers, to ruin.

On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful

against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was north Italy;

the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and retreats

depended chiefly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German army

invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy, lost

Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and unsuccessful

siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces, defeated, wounded,

and taken prisoner. He sent back a message to his queen that all was

“lost but honour,” made a humiliating peace, and broke it as soon as he

was liberated so that even the salvage of honour was but temporary.

Henry VIII and the Pope, in obedience to the rules of Machiavellian

strategy, now went over to the side of France in order to prevent

Charles becoming too powerful. The German troops in Milan, under the

Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their

commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it

(1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo while the

looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last

by the payment of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such stupid

and confused fighting impoverished all Europe and left the Emperor in

possession of Milan. In 1530 he was crowned by the Pope--he was the last

German Emperor to be crowned by the Pope--at Bologna. One thinks of the

rather dull-looking blonde face, with its long lip and chin, bearing the

solemn expression of one who endures a doubtful though probably

honourable ceremony.

Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had

defeated and killed the King of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,

and in 1529, as we have already noted, Suleiman the Magnificent very

nearly took Vienna. The Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances,

and did his utmost to drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest

difficulty in getting the German princes to unite, even with this

formidable enemy upon their very borders. Francis I remained implacable

for a time, and there was a new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his

rival over to a more friendly attitude by ravaging the south of France.

Francis and Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk, but the

Protestant princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away

from Rome, had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League (named after the

little town of Schmalkalden in Hesse, at which its constitution was

arranged), against the Emperor, and in the place of a great campaign to

recover Hungary for Christendom Charles had to turn his mind to the

gathering internal struggle in Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the

opening war. It was a struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of

princes for ascendancy, now flaming into war and destruction, now

sinking back to intrigues and diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of

Machiavellian policies, that was to go on writhing incurably right into

the nineteenth century, and to waste and desolate Central Europe again

and again.

The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in these

gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an exceptionally

worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious dissensions that

were tearing Europe into warring fragments as genuine theological

differences. He gathered diets and councils in futile attempts at

reconciliation. Formulæ and confessions were tried over. The student of

German history must struggle with the details of the Religious Peace of

Nuremberg, the settlement at the diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of

Augsburg, and the like. Here we do but mention them as details in the

worried life of this culminating emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly

one of the multifarious princes and rulers in Europe seems to have been

acting in good faith. The widespread religious trouble of the world, the

desire of the common people for truth and social righteousness, the

spreading knowledge of the time, all those things were merely counters

in the imaginations of princely diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who

had begun his career with a book written against heresy, and who had

been rewarded by the Pope with the title of “Defender of the Faith,”

being anxious to divorce his first wife in favour of an animated young

lady named Anne Boleyn,[401] and wishing also to turn against the

Emperor in favour of Francis I and to loot the vast wealth of the church

in England, joined the company of Protestant princes in 1530. Sweden,

Denmark, and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.

[Illustration: Henry VIII.]

The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the death of

Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents of the campaign.

The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at Lochau. By something very

like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor’s chief remaining

antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks were bought off by

the payment of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the great relief of the

Emperor, Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles got to a kind of

settlement, and made his last efforts to effect peace where there was

no peace. In 1552 all Germany was at war again, only a precipitate

flight from Innsbruck saved Charles from capture, and in 1552, with the

treaty of Passau, came another unstable equilibrium. Charles was now

utterly weary of the cares and splendours of empire; he had never had a

very sound constitution, he was naturally indolent, and he was suffering

greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his sovereign rights

in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and Spain and the Netherlands he

resigned to his son Philip. He then retired to a monastery at Yuste,

among the oak and chestnut forests in the hills to the north of the

Tagus valley, and there he died in 1558.

[Illustration: Charles V.]

Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement, this

renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan, world-weary,

seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his retreat was

neither solitary nor austere; he had with him nearly a hundred and fifty

attendants; his establishment had all the indulgences without the

fatigues of a court, and Philip II was a dutiful son to whom his

father’s advice was a command. As for his austerities, let Prescott

witness: “In the almost daily correspondence between Quixada, or

Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is scarcely a

letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor’s eating or his

illness. The one seems naturally to follow, like a running commentary,

on the other. It is rare that such topics have formed the burden of

communications with the department of state. It must have been no easy

matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal of

despatches in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed

together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to make a

detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and bring supplies for

the royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish to serve for the

_jour maigre_ that was to follow. The trout in the neighbourhood

Charles thought too small; so others, of a larger size, were to be sent

from Valladolid. Fish of every kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was

anything that in its nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels,

frogs, oysters, occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare.

Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him; and he

regretted that he had not brought a better supply of these from the Low

Countries. On an eel-pasty he particularly doted.”...[402]

In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III granting him a

dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his fast early in

the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.

“That Charles was not altogether unmindful of his wearing apparel in

Yuste, may be inferred from the fact that his wardrobe contained no less

than sixteen robes of silk and velvet, lined with ermine, or eider down,

or the soft hair of the Barbary goat. As to the furniture and upholstery

of his apartments, how little reliance is to be placed on the reports so

carelessly circulated about these may be gathered from a single glance

at the inventory of his effects, prepared by Quixada and Gaztelu soon

after their master’s death. Among the items we find carpets from Turkey

and Alcarez, canopies of velvet and other stuffs, hangings of fine black

cloth, which since his mother’s death he had always chosen for his own

bedroom; while the remaining apartments were provided with no less than

twenty-five suits of tapestry, from the looms of Flanders, richly

embroidered with figures of animals and with landscapes.... Among the

different pieces of plate we find some of pure gold, and others

especially noted for their curious workmanship; and as this was an age

in which the art of working the precious metals was carried to the

highest perfection, we cannot doubt that some of the finest specimens

had come into the Emperor’s possession. The whole amount of plate was

estimated at between twelve and thirteen thousand ounces in weight.”...[403]

Charles had never acquired the habit of reading, but he would be read

aloud to at meals after the fashion of Charlemagne, and would make what

one narrator describes as a “sweet and heavenly commentary.” He also

amused himself with technical toys, by listening to music or sermons,

and by attending to the imperial business that still came drifting in to

him. The death of the Empress, to whom he was greatly attached, had

turned his mind towards religion, which in his case took a punctilious

and ceremonial form; every Friday in Lent he scourged himself with the

rest of the monks with such good will as to draw blood. These exercises

and the gout released a bigotry in Charles that had been hitherto

restrained by considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant

teaching close at hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. “Tell the grand

inquisitor and his council from me to be at their posts, and to lay the

axe at the root of the evil before it spreads further.”... He expressed

a doubt whether it would not be well, in so black an affair, to dispense

with the ordinary course of justice, and to show no mercy; “lest the

criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of repeating his

crime.” He recommended, as an example, his own mode of proceeding in the

Netherlands, “where all who remained obstinate in their errors were

burned alive, and those who were admitted to penitence were beheaded.”

Among the chief pleasures of the Catholic monarch between meals during

this time of retirement were funeral services. He not only attended

every actual funeral that was celebrated at Yuste, but he had services

conducted for the absent dead, he held a funeral service in memory of

his wife on the anniversary of her death, and finally he celebrated his

own obsequies. “The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of

hundreds of wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness.

The brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor’s household

clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque, shrouded also

in black, which had been raised in the centre of the chapel. The service

for the burial of the dead was then performed; and, amidst the dismal

wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit, that it

might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The sorrowful

attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their master’s death

was presented to their minds--or they were touched, it may be, with

compassion by this pitiable display of weakness. Charles, muffled in a

dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his

household, the spectator of his own obsequies; and the doleful ceremony

was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of the priest, in

sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty.”

Other accounts make Charles wear a shroud and lie in the coffin,

remaining there alone until the last mourner had left the chapel.

Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the greatness of

the Holy Roman Empire died with him. The Holy Roman Empire struggled on

indeed to the days of Napoleon, but as an invalid and dying thing.

§ 11B

Ferdinand, the brother of Charles V, took over his abandoned work and

met the German princes at the diet of Augsburg in 1555. Again there was

an attempt to establish a religious peace. Nothing could better show the

quality of that attempted settlement and the blindness of the princes

and statesmen concerned in it, to the deeper and broader processes of

the time, than the form that settlement took. The recognition of

religious freedom was to apply to the states and not to individual

citizens; _cujus regio ejus religio_, “_the confession of the subject

was to be dependent on that of the territorial lord_.”

§ 11C

We have given as much attention as we have done to the writings of

Machiavelli and to the personality of Charles V because they throw a

flood of light upon the antagonisms of the next period in our history.

This present chapter has told the story of a vast expansion of human

horizons and of a great increase and distribution of knowledge; we have

seen the conscience of common men awakening and intimations of a new and

profounder social justice spreading throughout the general body of the

Western civilization. But this process of light and thought was leaving

courts and the political life of the world untouched. There is little in

Machiavelli that might not have been written by some clever secretary

in the court of Chosroes I or Shi-Hwang-ti--or even of Sargon I or Pepi.

While the world in everything else was moving forward, in political

ideas, in ideas about the relationship of state to state and of

sovereign to citizen, it was standing still. Nay, it was falling back.

For the great idea of the Catholic Church as the world city of God had

been destroyed in men’s minds by the church itself, and the dream of a

world imperialism had, in the person of Charles V, been carried in

effigy through Europe to limbo. Politically the world seemed falling

back towards personal monarchy of the Assyrian or Macedonian pattern.

It is not that the newly awakened intellectual energies of western

European men were too absorbed in theological restatement, in scientific

investigations, in exploration and mercantile development, to give a

thought to the claims and responsibilities of rulers. Not only were

common men drawing ideas of a theocratic or republican or communistic

character from the now accessible Bible, but the renewed study of the

Greek classics was bringing the creative and fertilizing spirit of Plato

to bear upon the Western mind. In England Sir Thomas More produced a

quaint imitation of Plato’s _Republic_ in his _Utopia_, setting out a

sort of autocratic communism. In Naples, a century later, a certain

friar Campanella was equally bold in his _City of the Sun_. But such

discussions were having no immediate effect upon political arrangements.

Compared with the massiveness of the task, these books do indeed seem

poetical and scholarly and flimsy. (Yet later on the _Utopia_ was to

bear fruit in the English Poor Laws.) The intellectual and moral

development of the Western mind and this drift towards Machiavellian

monarchy in Europe were for a time going on concurrently in the same

world, but they were going on almost independently. The statesmen still

schemed and manœuvred as if nothing grew but the power of wary and

fortunate kings. It was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

that these two streams of tendency, the stream of general ideas and the

drift of traditional and egoistic monarchical diplomacy, interfered and

came into conflict.

BOOK VIII

THE AGE OF THE GREAT POWERS

XXXVI

PRINCES, PARLIAMENTS, AND POWERS

§ 1. _Princes and Foreign Policy._ § 2. _The English Republic._ §

3. _The Dutch Republic._ § 4. _The Break-up and Disorder of

Germany._ § 5. _The Splendours of Grand Monarchy in Europe._ § 6.

_The Growth of the Idea of Great Powers._ § 7. _The Crowned

Republic of Poland and Its Fate._ § 8. _The First Scramble for

Empire Overseas._ § 9. _Britain Dominates India._ § 10. _Russia’s

Ride to the Pacific._ §11. _What Gibbon Thought of the World in

1780._ § 12. _The Social Truce Draws to an End._

§ 1

In the preceding chapter we have traced the beginnings of a new

civilization, the civilization of the “modern” type which becomes at the

present time world-wide. It is still a vast unformed thing, still only

in the opening phases of growth and development to-day. We have seen the

mediæval ideas of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Roman Church, as

forms of universal law and order, fade in its dawn. They fade out, as if

it were necessary in order that these ideas of one law and one order for

all men should be redrawn on world-wide lines. And while in nearly every

other field of human interest there was advance, the effacement of these

general political ideas of the Church and Empire led back for a time in

things political towards merely personal monarchy and monarchist

nationalism of the Macedonian type. There came an interregnum, as it

were, in the consolidation of human affairs, a phase of the type the

Chinese annalists would call an “Age of Confusion.” This interregnum has

lasted as long as that between the fall of the Western Empire and the

crowning of Charlemagne in Rome. We are living in it to-day. It may be

drawing to its close; we cannot tell yet. The old leading ideas had

broken down, a medley of new and untried projects and suggestions

perplexed men’s minds and actions, and meanwhile the world at large had

to fall back for leadership upon the ancient tradition of an individual

prince. There was no new way clearly apparent for men to follow, and the

prince was there.

All over the world the close of the sixteenth century saw monarchy

prevailing and tending towards absolutism. Germany and Italy were

patchworks of autocratic princely dominions, Spain was practically

autocratic, the throne had never been so powerful in England, and as the

seventeenth century drew on, the French monarchy gradually became the

greatest and most consolidated power in Europe. The phases and

fluctuations of its ascent we cannot record here.

At every court there were groups of ministers and secretaries who played

a Machiavellian game against their foreign rivals. Foreign policy is the

natural employment of courts and monarchies. Foreign offices are, so to

speak, the leading characters in all the histories of the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries. They kept Europe in a fever of wars. And wars

were becoming expensive. Armies were no longer untrained levies, no

longer assemblies of feudal knights who brought their own horses and

weapons and retainers with them; they needed more and more artillery;

they consisted of paid troops who insisted on their pay; they were

professional and slow and elaborate, conducting long sieges,

necessitating elaborate fortifications. War expenditure increased

everywhere and called for more and more taxation. And here it was that

these monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came into

conflict with new and shapeless forces of freedom in the community. In

practice the princes found they were not masters of their subjects’

lives or property. They found an inconvenient resistance to the taxation

that was necessary if their diplomatic aggressions and alliances were to

continue. Finance became an unpleasant spectre in every council chamber.

In theory the monarch owned his country. James I of England (1603)

declared that “As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can

do; so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what

a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that.” In practice,

however, he found, and his son Charles I (1625) was to find still more

effectually, that there were in his dominions a great number of

landlords and merchants, substantial and intelligent persons, who set a

very definite limit to the calls and occasions of the monarch and his

ministers. They were prepared to tolerate his rule if they themselves

might also be monarchs of their lands and businesses and trades and what

not. But not otherwise.

Everywhere in Europe there was a parallel development. Beneath the kings

and princes there were these lesser monarchs, the private owners,

noblemen, wealthy citizens, and the like, who were now offering the

sovereign prince much the same resistance that the kings and princes of

Germany had offered the Emperor. They wanted to limit taxation so far as

it pressed upon themselves, and to be free in their own houses and

estates. And the spread of books and reading and inter-communication was

enabling these smaller monarchs, these monarchs of ownership, to develop

such a community of ideas and such a solidarity of resistance as had

been possible at no previous stage in the world’s history. Everywhere

they were disposed to resist the prince, but it was not everywhere that

they found the same faculties for an organized resistance. The economic

circumstances and the political traditions of the Netherlands and

England made those countries the first to bring this antagonism of

monarchy and private ownership to an issue.[404]

At first this seventeenth-century “public,” this public of property

owners, cared very little for foreign policy. They did not perceive at

first how it affected them. They did not want to be bothered with it;

it was, they conceded, the affairs of kings and princes.[405] They made

no attempts therefore to control foreign entanglements. But it was with

the direct consequences of these entanglements that they quarrelled;

they objected to heavy taxation, to interference with trade, to

arbitrary imprisonment, and to the control of consciences by the

monarch. It was upon these questions that they joined issue with the

Crown.

§ 2

The open struggle of the private property owner against the aggressions

of the “Prince” begins in England far back in the twelfth century.[406]

The phase in this struggle that we have to study now is the phase that

opened with the attempts of Henry VII and VIII and their successors,

Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, to make the government of England a

“personal monarchy” of the continental type. It became more acute when,

by dynastic accidents, James, King of Scotland, became James I, King of

both Scotland and England (1603), and began to talk in the manner we

have already quoted of his “divine right” to do as he pleased. But never

had the path of English monarchy been a smooth one. In all the

monarchies of the Northmen and Germanic invaders of the empire there had

been a tradition of a popular assembly of influential and representative

men to preserve their general liberties, and in none was it more living

than in England. France had her tradition of the assembly of the Three

Estates, Spain her Cortes, but the English assembly was peculiar in two

respects: that it had behind it a documentary declaration of certain

elementary and universal rights, and that it contained elected “Knights

of the Shire,” as well as elected burghers from the towns. The French

and Spanish assemblies had the latter, but not the former element.

These two features gave the English Parliament a peculiar strength in

its struggle with the Throne. The document in question was _Magna

Carta_, the Great Charter, a declaration which was forced from King John

(1199-1216), the brother and successor of Richard Cœur de Lion

(1189-99) after a revolt of the Barons in 1215. It rehearsed a number of

fundamental rights that made England a legal and not a regal state. It

rejected the power of the king to control the personal property and

liberty of every sort of citizen--save with the consent of that man’s

equals.

The presence of the elected shire representatives in the English

Parliament, the second peculiarity of the British situation, came about

from very simple and apparently innocuous beginnings. From the shires,

or county divisions, knights seem to have been summoned to the national

council to testify to the taxable capacity of their districts. They were

sent up by the minor gentry, freeholders and village elders of their

districts as early as 1254, two knights from each shire. This idea

inspired Simon de Montfort,[407] who was in rebellion against Henry III,

the successor of John, to summon to the national council two knights

from each shire and two citizens from each city or borough. Edward I,

the successor to Henry III, continued this practice because it seemed a

convenient way of getting into financial touch with the growing towns.

At first there was considerable reluctance on the parts of the knights

and townsmen to attend Parliament, but gradually the power they

possessed of linking the redress of grievances with the granting of

subsidies was realized. Quite early, if not from the first, these

representatives of the general property owners in town and country, the

Commons, sat and debated apart from the great Lords and Bishops. So

there grew up in England a representative assembly, the Commons, beside

an episcopal and patrician one, the Lords. There was no profound and

fundamental difference between the personnel of the two assemblies; many

of the knights of the shire were substantial men who might be as wealthy

and influential as peers and also the sons and brothers of peers, but on

the whole the Commons was the more plebeian assembly. From the first

these two assemblies, and especially the Commons, displayed a

disposition to claim the entire power of taxation in the land. Gradually

they extended their purview of grievances to a criticism of all the

affairs of the realm. We will not follow the fluctuations of the power

and prestige of the English Parliament through the time of the Tudor

monarchs (_i.e._, Henry VII and VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth),

but it will be manifest from what has been said that when at last James

Stuart made his open claim to autocracy, the English merchants, peers,

and private gentlemen found themselves with a tried and honoured

traditional means of resisting him such as no other people in Europe

possessed.

Another peculiarity of the English political conflict was its

comparative detachment from the great struggle between Catholic and

Protestant that was now being waged all over Europe. There were, it is

true, very distinct religious issues mixed up in the English struggle,

but upon its main lines it was a political struggle of King against the

Parliament embodying the class of private-property-owning citizens. Both

Crown and people were formally reformed and Protestant. It is true that

many people on the latter side were Protestants of a Bible-respecting,

non-sacerdotal type, representing the reformation according to the

peoples, and that the king was the nominal head of a special sacerdotal

and sacramental church, the established Church of England, representing

the reformation according to the princes, but this antagonism never

completely obscured the essentials of the conflict.

The struggle of King and Parliament had already reached an acute phase

before the death of James I (1625), but only in the reign of his son

Charles I did it culminate in civil war. Charles did exactly what one

might have expected a king to do in such a position, in view of the lack

of Parliamentary control over foreign policy; he embroiled the country

in a conflict with both Spain and France, and then came to the country

for supplies in the hope that patriotic feeling would override the

normal dislike to giving him money. When Parliament refused supplies, he

demanded loans from various subjects, and attempted similar illegal

exactions. This produced from Parliament in 1628 a very memorable

document, the _Petition of Right_, citing the Great Charter and

rehearsing the legal limitations upon the power of the English king,

denying his right to levy charges upon, or to imprison, or punish

anyone, or to quarter soldiers on the people, without due process of

law. The Petition of Right stated the case of the English Parliament.

The disposition to “state a case” has always been a very marked English

characteristic. When President Wilson, during the Great War of 1914-18,

prefaced each step in his policy by a “Note,” he was walking in the most

respectable traditions of the English. Charles dealt with this

Parliament with a high hand, he dismissed it in 1629, and for eleven

years he summoned no Parliament. He levied money illegally, but not

enough for his purpose; and realizing that the church could be used as

an instrument of obedience, he made Laud, an aggressive high churchman,

very much of a priest and a very strong believer in “divine right,”

Archbishop of Canterbury, and so head of the Church of England.

In 1638 Charles tried to extend the half-Protestant, half-Catholic

characteristics of the Church of England to his other kingdom of

Scotland, where the secession from catholicism had been more complete,

and where a non-sacerdotal, non-sacramental form of Christianity,

Presbyterianism, had been established as the national church. The Scotch

revolted, and the English levies Charles raised to fight them mutinied.

Insolvency, at all tunes the natural result of a “spirited” foreign

policy, was close at hand. Charles, without money or trustworthy troops,

had to summon a Parliament at last in 1640. This Parliament, the Short

Parliament, he dismissed in the same year; he tried a Council of Peers

at York (1640), and then, in the November of that year, summoned his

last Parliament.

This body, the Long Parliament, assembled in the mood for conflict. It

seized Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and charged him with treason.

It published a “Grand Remonstrance,” which was a long and full statement

of its case against Charles. It provided by a bill for a meeting of

Parliament at least once in three years, whether the King summoned it or

no. It prosecuted the King’s chief ministers who had helped him to reign

for so long without Parliament, and in particular the Earl of Strafford.

To save Strafford the King plotted for a sudden seizure of London by the

army. This was discovered, and the Bill for Strafford’s condemnation was

hurried on in the midst of a vast popular excitement. Charles I, who

was probably one of the meanest and most treacherous occupants the

English throne has ever known, was frightened by the London crowds.

Before Strafford could die by due legal process, it was necessary for

the King to give his assent. Charles gave it--and Strafford was

beheaded. Meanwhile the King was plotting and looking for help in

strange quarters--from the Catholic Irish, from treasonable Scotchmen.

Finally he resorted to a forcible-feeble display of violence. He went

down to the Houses of Parliament to arrest five of his most active

opponents. He entered the House of Commons and took the Speaker’s chair.

He was prepared with some bold speech about treason, but when he saw the

places of his five antagonists vacant, he was baffled, confused, and

spoke in broken sentences. He learnt that they had departed from his

royal city of Westminster and taken refuge in the city of London (see

chap. xxv, § 7). London defied him. A week later the Five Members were

escorted back in triumph to the Parliament House in Westminster by the

Trained Bands of London, and the King, to avoid the noise and hostility

of the occasion, left Whitehall for Windsor.

Both parties then prepared openly for war.

The King was the traditional head of the army, and the habit of

obedience in soldiers is to the King. The Parliament had the greater

resources. The King set up his standard at Nottingham on the eve of a

dark and stormy August day in 1642. There followed a long and obstinate

civil war, the King holding Oxford, the Parliament, London. Success

swayed from side to side but the King could never close on London nor

Parliament take Oxford. Each antagonist was weakened by moderate

adherents who “did not want to go too far.” There emerged among the

Parliamentary commanders a certain Oliver Cromwell, who had raised a

small troop of horse and who rose to the position of general. Lord

Warwick, his contemporary, describes him as a plain man, in a cloth suit

“made by an ill country tailor.” He was no mere fighting soldier, but a

military organizer; he realized the inferior quality of many of the

Parliamentary forces, and set himself to remedy it. The Cavaliers of the

King had the picturesque tradition of chivalry and loyalty on their

side; Parliament was something new and difficult--without any

comparable traditions. “Your troops are most of them old decayed serving

men and tapsters,” said Cromwell. “Do you think that the spirits of such

base and mean fellows will ever be able to encounter gentlemen that have

honour and courage and resolution in them?” But there is something

better and stronger than picturesque chivalry in the world, religious

enthusiasm. He set himself to get together a “godly” regiment. They were

to be earnest, sober-living men. Above all, they were to be men of

strong convictions. He disregarded all social traditions, and drew his

officers from every class. “I had rather have a plain, russet-coated

captain _that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows_, than

what you call a gentleman and is nothing else.” England discovered a new

force, the Ironsides, in its midst, in which footmen, draymen, and

ships’ captains held high command, side by side with men of family. They

became the type on which the Parliament sought to reconstruct its entire

army. The Ironsides were the backbone of this “New Model.” From Marston

Moor to Naseby these men swept the Cavaliers before them. The King was

at last a captive in the hands of Parliament.

There were still attempts at settlement that would have left the King a

sort of king, but Charles was a man doomed to tragic issues, incessantly

scheming, “so false a man that he is not to be trusted.” The English

were drifting towards a situation new in the world’s history, in which a

monarch should be formally tried for treason to his people and

condemned.

Most revolutions are precipitated, as this English one was, by the

excesses of the ruler, and by attempts at strength and firmness beyond

the compass of the law; and most revolutions swing by a kind of

necessity towards an extremer conclusion than is warranted by the

original quarrel. The English revolution was no exception. The English

are by nature a compromising and even a vacillating people, and probably

the great majority of them still wanted the King to be King and the

people to be free, and all the lions and lambs to lie down together in

peace and liberty. But the army of the New Model could not go back.

There would have been scant mercy for these draymen and footmen who had

ridden down the King’s gentlemen if the King came back. When Parliament

began to treat again with this regal trickster, the New Model

intervened; Colonel Pride turned out eighty members from the House of

Commons who favoured the King, and the illegal residue, the Rump

Parliament, then put the King on trial.

But indeed the King was already doomed. The House of Lords rejected the

ordinance for the trial, and the Rump then proclaimed “that the People

are under God, the original of all just power,” and that “the Commons of

England ... have the supreme power in this nation,” and--assuming that

it was itself the Commons--proceeded with the trial. The King was

condemned as a “tyrant, traitor, murderer, and enemy of his country.” He

was taken one January morning in 1649 to a scaffold erected outside the

windows of his own banqueting-room at Whitehall. There he was beheaded.

He died with piety and a certain noble self-pity--eight years after the

execution of Strafford, and after six and a half years of a destructive

civil war which had been caused almost entirely by his own lawlessness.

This was indeed a great and terrifying thing that Parliament had done.

The like of it had never been heard of in the world before. Kings had

killed each other times enough; parricide, fratricide, assassination,

those are the privileged expedients of princes; but that a section of

the people should rise up, try its king solemnly and deliberately for

disloyalty, mischief, and treachery, and condemn and kill him, sent

horror through every court in Europe. The Rump Parliament had gone

beyond the ideas and conscience of its time. It was as if a committee of

jungle deer had taken and killed a tiger--a crime against nature. The

Tsar of Russia chased the English envoy from his court. France and

Holland committed acts of open hostility. England, confused and

conscience-stricken at her own sacrilege, stood isolated before the

world.

But for a time the personal quality of Oliver Cromwell and the

discipline and strength of the army he had created maintained England in

the republican course she had taken. The Irish Catholics had made a

massacre of the Protestant English in Ireland, and now Cromwell

suppressed the Irish insurrection with great vigour. Except for certain

friars at the storm of Drogheda, none but men with arms in their hands

were killed by his troops; but the atrocities of the massacre were fresh

in his mind, no quarter was given in battle, and so his memory still

rankles in the minds of the Irish, who have a long memory for their own

wrongs. After Ireland came Scotland, where Cromwell shattered a Royalist

army at the Battle of Dunbar (1650). Then he turned his attention to

Holland, which country had rashly seized upon the divisions among the

English as an excuse for the injury of a trade rival. The Dutch were

then the rulers of the sea, and the English fleet fought against odds;

but after a series of obstinate sea fights the Dutch were driven from

the British seas and the English took their place as the ascendant naval

power. Dutch and French ships must dip their flags to them. An English

fleet went into the Mediterranean--the first English naval force to

enter those waters; it put right various grievances of the English

shippers with Tuscany and Malta, and bombarded the pirate nest of

Algiers and destroyed the pirate fleet--which in the lax days of Charles

had been wont to come right up to the coast of Cornwall and Devon to

intercept ships and carry off slaves to Africa. The strong arm of

England also intervened to protect the Protestants in the south of

France, who were being hunted to death by the Duke of Savoy. France,

Sweden, Denmark, all found it wiser to overcome their first distaste for

regicide and allied themselves with England. Came a war with Spain, and

the great English Admiral Blake destroyed the Spanish Plate Fleet at

Teneriffe in an action of almost incredible daring. He engaged land

batteries. He was the first man “that brought ships to contemn castles

on the shore.” (He died in 1657, and was buried in Westminster Abbey,

but after the restoration of the monarchy his bones were dug out by the

order of Charles II, and removed to St. Margaret’s, Westminster.) Such

was the figure that England cut in the eyes of the world during her

brief republican days.