THE FRUIT OF DISRUPTION
With the Reformation the chief motive of my examination disappears and
the main matter of it. For I set out to examine whether Mr. Wells were
competent as an historian to attack the Faith of Christian men, and the
matter to my hand was his attitude towards the main doctrines of Faith
and his acquaintance with the rise and character of the thing he hates
so much.
The essential work is over when we come to the end of the great
disruption which broke up the Unity of our Civilization and has bred the
increasing ills from which we suffer.
I shall, therefore, do no more in this, the close of my book, than very
briefly survey Mr. Wells’s competence to deal with the modern world
since, say, 1600: testing that competence by one or two special points.
I shall conclude with a Summary.
Since the Reformation Western Europe has stood divided into a Catholic
and a Protestant culture. This does not to-day mean a division into two
groups of opposing religious profession. It means two whole social
developments proceeding from original Religious differences. Your
Atheist of the Protestant culture is a different man altogether from
your Atheist of the Catholic culture.
Mr. Wells writes in the midst of the Protestant culture. He knows
nothing of the Catholic. He understands the motives and general
character of that Protestant part of our civilization to which he
himself belongs. He understands it more or less when it is Prussian,
better when it is English, and best of all when it is of the
neighbourhood of London. When he is dealing with such things he does his
job reasonably well. With the other part of modern Europe and the
Catholic part of all Europe he deals ill; for it thinks and talks in
what is to him spiritually a foreign and unknown language, and he even
deals ill with that part of his own region—e.g. the new English
Aristocratic State produced by the Reformation—which requires a feeling
for tradition.
I select three points. First, an examination of what may be called the
wind-up of the Reformation in England; to wit, the destruction of the
English Monarchy in the seventeenth century and its replacing by an
oligarchy of the well-to-do; for by the way in which a man treats that
development, his general culture in the field of modern European history
may very well be tested. Secondly, the corresponding Continental modern
movement, ending with the French Revolution. Thirdly, what he has to say
(and he says it very badly) about the effects upon the European mind,
and particularly upon religion, of our physiological and biological
discoveries, theories and blunders in the nineteenth century.
First, then, to the victory of the governing classes in England over the
Crown, which was the final effect of the Reformation here.
Mr. Wells repeats upon the origins of Parliament what may be called the
elementary-school-textbook legend. It is, of course, erroneous, and it
is a type of those errors which, though apparently unconnected with
error in religion, are really dependent upon such error. For it proceeds
from a lack of comprehension of that united Catholic Europe of Middle
Ages from which we all spring.
He tells us, to begin with, that monarchy in England was surrounded,
after the breakdown of the Roman Empire, by Magnates who watched the
common interests and modified the power of the monarch, but he adds that
this was due to the presence of northern and Germanic blood. This is, of
course, mere repetition of what is still written in a great many of our
popular textbooks. It is, therefore, natural that Mr. Wells should
repeat it. None the less it shows ignorance of essentials. It contains,
like so many popular myths, a truth and a falsehood combined.
Local governments, after the breakdown of central rule from Rome, were
invariably a combination of the local general and a group of Magnates
round him. That is true. But the second statement—that one of the two
which is important—is quite false. So little had this grouping of
Magnates round the king to do with Germanic blood, that you find it
everywhere the same throughout Europe, and actually weaker in the
Germanies than anywhere else.
Moreover, the group of Magnates is hardly apparent at the beginning of
the business when many of the local Roman generals, such as Theodoric,
were of still unmixed Germanic blood. The Magnates only become strong
much later in the centuries, and by that time the Germanic blood in the
West had disappeared.
People of Northern Germanic blood have never shown any particular
dislike to being governed absolutely by one man. Indeed they have been
rather more docile under such a political condition than Southern people
and Western people during and since the Dark Ages.
What made the gathering of Magnates round the Government a necessity
during the Dark Ages was the return to primitive conditions, the
comparative difficulty of communications, and the continual armament of
a free society, which was perpetually in conflict either domestic or
through resistance to the Mohammedans and the heathens. You do not find
absolutely centralized monarchy anywhere in the Dark Ages. You find it
no more in Ireland or in Brittany or Galicia than you find it in the
Rhine Valley or in Scandinavia; and the reason that you do not find it
is that, under primitive conditions, such a thing cannot exist. Absolute
monarchy, to be exercised over great numbers, needs high organization.
Mr. Wells is right in saying that the presence of Knights of the Shire
gave the British Parliament a special character; but he is quite at sea
as to why they gave it a special character. The special character of the
English Third Estate did not lie in the calling up to the King’s Council
of men representing the smaller gentry. _That_ happened all over France
and Northern Spain, and it began abroad long before it began in England.
The first parliaments of Europe were in the Pyrenees.
The special character of the English Commons House lay in the fact that
the smaller gentry elsewhere sat in a house of their own, but here sat
_with_ the merchants of the towns; and this made at last an organized
unit wherein the combined wealth of the country could act against the
King, who was the common guardian of all, rich and poor. In other words,
the special constitution of the English Third Estate was one tending
towards aristocracy.
But England would never have become an aristocracy—as at last it did—nor
would popular monarchy ever have been defeated and replaced by rule of
the gentry had it not been for one economic factor of overwhelming
importance of which Mr. Wells appears not to grasp the effect, I mean
the dissolution of the monasteries. He does not even mention this
prodigious economic revolution as having any connection with Parliament;
yet it was the Dissolution which gave Parliament all its new power after
the Reformation and enabled it to destroy the Crown.
The reason was this: the monastic land and a great deal of other Church
endowment as well (the endowment of a great many schools and hospitals
and confraternities of all kinds, and endowments for Masses, etc., and a
great part of the Bishopric endowments) passed into the hands of the
Squires and greater Burgesses—the gentry—and immensely increased their
economic power, while the economic power of the English Crown was
correspondingly depressed. That is the whole story.
The English Crown provided its own ruin by its ecclesiastical policy. It
could no longer obtain the revenue necessary for running the country;
the Squires and the great merchants had become much richer than it. Only
by expedients could the King struggle on for a few years at a time by
trying to put more land into the hands of the Government (resumption of
the King’s rights over the forests), by selling monopolies, by reviving
quaint old forgotten taxes, and (in one case and for several years) by
accepting support from a foreign Government. The victory of the gentry
over the Crown (which Mr. Wells seems to regard as a popular victory!)
was the consequence of an economic revolution which had preceded it, and
that economic revolution in its turn was a consequence of the
Reformation.
Mr. Wells, whose tendency being materialism is all for exaggerating of
the economic factor in history, should have spotted this; he has an
acute and an original power of observation in such things. But he can
well be excused through this fact that none of the ordinary official
textbooks such as he would come across would put the truth before him.
In the same way, he evidently does not know who and what Oliver Cromwell
was. To give us an idea of the man, he quotes one sentence about his
“country cut clothes,” giving the impression (which is certainly Mr.
Wells’s own) that Cromwell was a bluff “man of the people.” But the
whole point of Cromwell was that he was a cadet of one of the very
wealthiest of the new millionaire families. The “Cromwells” (an assumed
name) had built up their enormous and ill-gotten fortune on the loot of
religion. Cromwell’s real name was Williams. The original Williams, his
great-grandfather, was the favourite nephew of that Thomas Cromwell, the
moneylender, who was the author of the policy of looting religion, and
who heavily endowed that favourite nephew with monastic lands. No fewer
than five great foundations—apart from lesser pickings—swelled the
gigantic wealth of the family. It is symbolic and typical of the whole
affair that Oliver Cromwell should come from those traditions of wealth
acquired at the expense of the Catholic Church. It is true he was only
the son of a cadet and therefore enjoyed but a small part of the family
fortunes—a few thousand a year as we should say nowadays. But he came
out of the very heart of the new millionaires. When he is represented as
some rough fellow sprung from the core of the populace it is history of
the very worst sort; not only baldly wrong in fact, but in tendency and
motive.
The same lack of general comprehension appears in Mr. Wells’s quite
honestly held idea of the Parliamentary army—particularly of the “new
model.” He thinks of it as a sort of democratic force. It was, as a
fact, a very highly paid professional body, especially its cavalry,
which was its decisive arm. Of course, there were many people of no
origin in it, and a few, not many, people of low birth even held
commands in it as officers. But it had a very large proportion of the
wealthy classes in such positions. Nor is it true to say that this
highly paid cavalry, well disciplined though it was, and containing
excellent personnel, “swept the cavaliers before them from Marston Moor
to Naseby.” That is typical of the quite wrong old-fashioned textbook
history from which such judgments are still drawn. Cavalry was the great
strength of Charles; and if there had only been cavalry on either side,
Charles would have won. It was the cavaliers who generally swept the
_mounted_ part of the “new model” before them, and particularly at
Naseby, but the counter-charge was fatal to the increasingly weak
infantry of the King.
Naseby was won by Oliver Cromwell, leading his cavalry in person against
shaken infantry. The Parliamentary horse was badly mauled by Rupert’s
horse on the left, but Cromwell on the right, checking the usual sweep
of the counter-charge, gave up the following-up of the horse, wheeled to
the left, and destroyed the badly trained, ill-disciplined and
numerically weak Welsh footmen of the centre. The cavalry part of the
few years’ fighting, when against cavalry, was in Charles’s favour, but
Charles’s infantry got weaker and weaker; and the reason that Charles
grew weaker and weaker in quality and numbers of infantry was lack of
money. His cavalry was composed largely of noble-hearted and devoted
volunteers, a good part of whom, popularly said to be half, were
Catholic; but his infantry he had to hire as best he could.
I only pick out these points (small in themselves) because they are
typical. They show the way in which the old conventional schoolboy
history of a lifetime ago is the only one our author possesses; and that
explains also his quite erroneous view of what the Reformation was in
England. He perpetuates what was once the official legend; naturally, no
doubt, for he has never heard the modern destructive criticism levelled
against it.
We have exactly the same thing in what he says of James II, that he “set
himself to force the country into a reunion with Rome.” That, again, is
the regular conventional stuff of his boyhood and mine, but it is
utterly unhistorical. James II set himself the task of procuring
toleration for that still very large proportion of the English people
who were Catholic, and incidentally for other dissenting bodies as well.
He insisted that the remaining minority of Catholics, who still
heroically practised their Religion after a century and half of
persecution unparalleled in any other country should be allowed ordinary
civic advantages. They were at least one-eighth of the population (and
had the sympathy of at least another eighth, if not more), and James,
himself a Catholic, proposed they should enjoy the benefits of the
national universities, should be allowed to enter the public services,
and should have as good chances as others in the legal profession. If
freedom for Catholics was likely to result in a great many conversions,
and thus largely to undo the work of the Reformation, the fault was not
with the policy of toleration, but with the spiritual power of the
Catholic Church. To say that James II was attempting to force upon his
Protestant subjects an unnatural revolution in their religion, is about
as historical as it would be to say that the modern French Government is
attempting to force Communism upon France because it offers (unlike most
other Governments) the fullest liberty to Communist printing and to the
exposing of Communist ideas through the Press. Or it is like saying that
the Canadian Government, because it tolerates the use of French and
English indifferently, is trying to force French (or English) upon the
whole community.
The whole policy of James was a policy of toleration and the whole of
the opposition he had to meet was a fanatical (and interested) refusal
of toleration.
Where Mr. Wells deals with the Continental movement, which has weakened
or destroyed Monarchy and broken up the religious unity of various
nations, we have again the same confused attitude which we find in his
dealing with the English one, only it is rather more remarkable that he
should be so wrong about the foreign business. For, after all, it is
natural enough for a man attempting to write a broad outline of History
to go wrong upon the modern English record, seeing that the modern
English record was not only everywhere taught officially, conventionally
and wrongly in Mr. Wells’s boyhood, but is still in the main so taught.
On English matters from the Reformation onward all our official History
is propaganda: The Stuarts always wrong, Magna Charta a whig document,
Cromwell a noble-hearted hero (and poor), etc. etc. etc. Only a good
deal of original reading among modern writers and hard thinking of one’s
own as well, can set one right upon it. But the Continental record has
been dealt with by the greatest scholars from all points of view and
with the fullest freedom for two generations. There is no excuse for
going wrong upon its main lines.
For instance, the tremendous struggle between the more civilized
traditional part of Germany, led by the Emperor, and the less civilized
northern part, led by the Protestant Princes, was decided adversely to
the Catholic Church at the Peace of Westphalia. Mr. Wells prints a good
little map of the results of that Peace. But what he certainly does not
understand, and probably has never heard of is that those results were
due to French policy. It was French deliberate support of the
anti-Catholic side in the Empire towards the end of the struggle which
prevented the evil of the Reformation in Germany from being undone, and
which left the Catholic civilization and tradition of the German Empire
in ruins.
He is also lacking in what should be part of the mental furniture of
every educated man, and that is the history and quality of what is
called religious toleration in the struggles of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Whether religious toleration be necessarily a good
thing may be left to debate; whether Mr. Wells regards it as a good
thing no man can tell, because he is all for it where a Catholic culture
is tolerating anti-Catholicism in its midst, and yet quite indifferent
to an anti-Catholic culture oppressing Catholicism in its midst. That is
a very frequent phenomenon in men who feel strongly and think weakly. I
have heard men propounding with violence the duty of the State to forbid
tobacco, wine, large families, free marriage of the poor, socialistic
literature, Sunday trading, and Heaven knows how many other things—and
everyone of them would have told you that he loved toleration!
Here we have Mr. Wells’s pronouncement that the “more tolerating
countries” became Protestant with happy little Catholic lumps inside
them, while the “less tolerating countries—France, Italy and Spain,”
produced societies in which men are either definitely Catholic or
Atheist, or, at any rate, strongly anti-Catholic.
A man who writes sentences of that sort about the processes which have
produced modern Europe, singling out France, Spain and Italy(!) as
specially intolerant, does not know what he is talking about. The
Protestant countries persecuted religion with a ferocity unknown
elsewhere. You find that persecution rampant in the exclusion of
Catholicism in the early laws of the Protestant culture in North America
as in England. The whole story of the Cecils is a story of drastic and
murderous persecution, the determination of the new Reformation
millionaires under Elizabeth and James I to stamp out the last vestiges,
and the first beginnings, of Catholic truth. Persecution of the most
extreme kind, relentless and overwhelming, is the one striking
characteristic of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Does
Mr. Wells imagine that he could find in any province under the Princes
of France, Italy or Spain the wholesale confiscation that went on in
Ireland: a whole people dispossessed of their land in the effort to
crush out the Church? Did the Valois or Louis XIII string up and
disembowel Protestant pastors for no other crime than the reciting of
their service?
Again, Mr. Wells does not understand what it is that makes men in the
Catholic culture either definitely Catholic or definitely and wholly
sceptical. It is that men in the Catholic culture _think_; they use the
human reason. If they have the Faith they argue that a Divine authority
will be infallible; they therefore accept _all_ its doctrine. If they
have lost the Faith, if they think the Church to be of human
institution, their reason bids them as a consequence combat an
organization which makes such enormous pretensions to authority without
(as they believe) any right to it.
The reason, for instance, that you do not have mawkish religious
sentiment hanging about such minds as, in Catholic countries, have lost
the Faith, is that those minds are founded upon Intelligence and despise
muddle-headed emotionalism. They admit their loss of doctrine, and they
are not afraid to face the consequence of whatever they conceive to be
the truth.
But in nations not of Catholic culture it is the other way about. Men
like Mr. Wells, who have ceased to believe that Our Blessed Lord was
God, or even that He had Divine authority, cling desperately to the
emotions which the old belief aroused—because they find those emotions
pleasant. That is a piece of intellectual weakness for which
corresponding men, atheists of the Catholic culture, very properly feel
a hearty contempt.
When Mr. Wells goes on to the climax of the affair abroad, which is the
French Revolution, his work becomes a mixture of good and bad. The
précis side of it is good in so far as it proceeds from his own pen. It
is, in my judgment, an error to print great wads of Carlyle, column
after column. Mr. Wells’s own less picturesque way of writing is much
better suited for an outline—but that is a small point. The sequence of
events and their proportion is well kept, and there is a very good
little sketch map of the Campaign of Valmy which shows that the
author—or whoever else it was that drew the map—has got a good clear
comprehension of that rather complicated and very important episode.
But in his attempts to judge the characters of the Revolution he goes
all wrong, because he is dealing with a whole side of Europe which is
unfamiliar to him. For instance, he does not know what the trouble was
with Marie Antoinette. It was not that she was grossly extravagant; that
is a mere legend. She was a lady; and certainly Mr. Wells would not give
one to understand that; moreover, during all the later part of her life
she had become a very sincerely religious woman, practising, frequenting
the Sacraments. The tragedy of the queen lay in the intimate relations
of her early married life. Now, everybody ought to know that who
pretends to deal with the period at all. The details have been fully
printed (by myself among others) and are available to popular writers.
In the same way he has got Robespierre all wrong. He has evidently read
nothing modern on Robespierre, and he commits the old error of recording
the last and worst of the Terror as being in particular Robespierre’s
work.
The point is of no very great importance, but it is worth quoting
because it is very characteristic. Ask one of Mr. Wells’s myriad-headed
popular public, who Robespierre was, and they would answer a fanatical
Republican who attempted to force his views upon France by guillotine,
and was at last put down because people sickened of the increasing
slaughter. Now when a popular author writes what his very large and
uninstructed public already believe they know, he naturally goes down;
if he wrote historical truth instead, his work would be less pleasant to
them and far less saleable. Yet, after all, truth is the test of good
history; not momentary selling value.
Now the truth about Robespierre is to-day fairly well known. Hamel’s
great monograph, though far too favourable to his subject, is crammed
with document and reference. It was not Robespierre, it was the
Committee of Public Safety, and Carnot in particular, who created the
Terror as an instrument of martial law. They created it in order to win
the desperate battle in which they were engaged on every frontier and
upon the sea, and the first sign of Robespierre’s downfall was his
desertion of the Committee of Public Safety. Carnot in particular saw
that Robespierre was interfering with the Committee’s rigour. The
Committee had no idea that when they had got rid of Robespierre the
false popular conception upon his character and position would release
the very heavy strain which the Terror had created and make the
continuation of it impossible: but though they did not see what was
coming, it was _they_ that deposed Robespierre, and they deposed him not
because he represented the Terror, but, on the contrary, because he
would have modified and restricted their power, of which the Terror was
the instrument.
If Mr. Wells would be at the pains to read the actual indictments on
which people were put to death in Paris, he would find that the great
majority of them were humble people, and most of them, humble or
prominent, were put to death for some form of weakening the military
effort; for sending money abroad, for attempting desertion to the enemy,
or helping him, or uttering “defeatist” sentiments, and so on.
On Mr. Wells’s very long and violent diatribe against Napoleon I shall
not delay. It is merely silly. Mr. Wells seems to have a personal grudge
against anyone in history who shows remarkable military talent, or,
indeed, remarkable powers of any kind, and these in the case of Napoleon
were combined with all the qualities which are to Mr. Wells like red
rags to a bull. He was of the Catholic culture, he had an immense genius
in nearly every department of human activity, he was a gentleman by
birth, he was a soldier by profession. It is, therefore, natural that
our author should be opposed to him strongly. But surely one can be
strongly opposed to an historical character without making a fool of
one’s self! I, for instance, am strongly opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s
character, I have no indulgence for his particular kind of vices,
cruelty and avarice and pride, while I have a natural indulgence for the
sensual frailties to which Cromwell was not inclined. But what would any
competent critic think of me as an historian if I denied Cromwell’s
energy, belittled his capacity as a cavalry leader, or doubted the
reality of his fanatical religion? If I made him out an insignificant
fellow?