parliament would have given the king permission to issue proclamations
having the authority of law." But the people, it cannot be too
emphatically repeated, were neither creatures crawling in the mire nor
red-tapists terrified at every innovation; they trusted the king, and he
did not violate their trust. The proclamations, so it was stipulated, were
not to tamper with existing laws; they were to meet exigencies in an
epoch of exigencies, and they met them with a wisdom and a promptness
which parliament could not come near. It is physiological
proclivities--not red tape, not parchment clauses, not Magna
Chartas--which keep a people free. It is rather red tape, and not the
occasional snapping of red tape which enfeebles liberty. If the
non-conformists, who by the bye detested Romanism more than they loved
religion, had not rejected the declaration of indulgence of Charles II.--a
declaration which gave to Romanists leave of worship as well as to
non-conformists--does any sane person believe that English freedom would
have been less than it now is? In our time a body of men who hate England
more than they love Ireland have, of set purpose, tumbled parliament into
the dust: now, if a capable and firm authority were entrusted for twelve
months with exceptional yet absolute control over parliamentary procedure,
does any sane person suppose that the English passion for free parliaments
would be lulled to sleep? Rule has often to be cruel in order to be kind.
Alas, the multitude is made up not of Cromwells, is indeed afraid of
Cromwells. In total ignorance of racial proclivities, it foolishly
believes that a Cromwellian speaker for twelve months would mean a
Cromwellian speaker for ever.
NOTE ON HENRY AND THE REFORMATION.
NOTE IX.
It is a singular misreading of history to say that Henry did much directly
or indirectly to help on the Reformation of the Church in this country,
although the part he played was not a small one. Neither was the
Reformation itself, grave and critical as it was, so sudden and volcanic
an upheaval as is generally believed.
Luther himself did not put forward a single new idea. No man is thinker
and fighter at once; at any rate, no man thinks and fights at the same
moment. Luther struck his blows for already accomplished thought. Curious
ideas of unknown dates--for history reveals mergings only, not beginnings,
not endings, and the student of men and movements might well exclaim
"nothing begins and nothing ends,"--ideas of unknown dates and unknown
birth-places had slowly come into existence. In Teutonic Europe at least,
the older ideas were becoming trivial and inadequate. It was the northern
Europe, which from the earliest times had been dogged in its courage both
bodily and mental; the Europe strong in that reverence for truth which
rests on courage, which is inseparable from courage, which never exists
apart from courage; the Europe strong in its respect for women; strong in
its fearlessness of death, of darkness, of storm, of the sea-lion, the
land monster, the unearthly ghost, and which was strong therefore in its
fearlessness of hell-fire and priestly threats. Celtic Europe, especially
Celtic Ireland, slept then and sleeps now the unbroken slumber of
credulity. Credulity and fear are allied. Celtic Ireland was palsied then,
and is palsied still, by the fear of what we may now call Father Furniss's
hell. It is surely not difficult to recall and therefore not difficult to
foretell the history of so widely differing races. Everywhere throughout
Teutonic Europe, in castle and monastery, in mansion and cottage, the
old-new ideas were talked over, drunk over, quarrelled over, shaken hands
over, slept over. Everywhere the poets--the peoples' voices then, for the
printed sheet, the coffee house, the club, were yet far off,--the poets,
Lindsay, Barbour and others in Scotland; Langland, Skelton and others in
England had, long before, pelted preachers and preaching with their
bitterest gibes. Those poets little knew how narrowly they escaped with
their lives; they escaped because they shouted their fierce diatribes just
before not just after the strife of battle. They had flashed out the
signals of undying warfare, but before the signals could be interpreted
the signallers had died in their beds. Thought, inquiry, discussion,
printing, poetry, the new learning, the older Lollardry had moved on with
quiet steps. A less quiet step was at hand, but this also, if less quiet,
was as natural and as inevitable as the stealthiest of preceding steps.
Europe had gradually become covered with a network of universities, and
students of every nationality were constantly passing from one to another.
One common language, Latin, bound university to university and thinking
men to thinking men. He who spoke to one spoke to all. The time was a sort
of hot-house, and the growth of man was "forced." Reaction attends on
action, but in the main, studious men made the universities--not
universities the studious men; in like-manner good men have made
religions, not religions so much good men. Ideas and opinions quickly
became common property; sooner or later they filtered down from the Latin
phrase to home-spun talk; filtered down also from the university to the
town, village, and busy highway.
The Papacy itself had made Papal rule impossible to vigorous peoples. With
curiously narrow ambition Popes have always preferred even limited
temporal importance to unlimited spiritual sway. Two Popes, nay at one
time three, had struggled not for the supremacy of religion but for merely
personal pre-eminence. Popes had fought Popes, councils had fought
councils, and each had called in the friendly infidel to fight the
catholic enemy. The catholic sack of catholic Rome had been accompanied by
greater lust and more copious bloodshed than the sack of Rome in olden
time by northern Infidels. The teachings, claims, and crimes native to
Rome, nay, even the imported refinements of the arts and letters and
elegancies of Paganism did what legions of full-blown Luthers could not
have done.
The Reformation, with its complex causes, its complex methods, its complex
products, is, more than other great movements, brimful of matter for
observation, thought, and inference.
The French Revolution was but one of a series of fierce uprisings of a
race which rises and slaughters whenever it has a chance. French history
teems with slaughters both in time of peace and time of war. Mediaeval
French Kings dared not arm their peasants with bows and arrows, for
otherwise not a nobleman or a gentleman would have been left alive. At the
close of the eighteenth century in France the oppression was heavy, the
opportunity was large, and the uprising was ferocious. No other people
have ever shown such a spectacle, and it is therefore idle to compare
other great national movements with it. French history stands alone: no
oppressor can oppress like the French oppressor; no retaliator can
retaliate like the French retaliator. It is a question much less of
politics than of organisation and race. But to return.
Mr. Carlyle, in his own rousing way and on a subject which deeply
interests him--Luther and the Reformation--mingles fine literary vigour
with an indifference to physiological teaching which is by no means
habitual with him. The heaven-born hero tells us what has become false and
unreal, and shows us--it is his special business--how we may _go back_ to
truth and reality. The humbler student believes that we are constantly
journeying _towards_ truth and reality--these lie not behind but in front
of us. The school of prophets tells us that the hero alights in front of
us and stands apart. The student declares that we all move together; that
we partly make our heroes, and partly they make us; that we have grades of
heroes; that they are not at all supernatural--we touch them, see them,
know them, send them to the front, keep them and dismiss them at our will,
or what seems our will. Carlyle affirms that modern civilisation took its
rise from the great scene at Worms. The truths of organisation, of body,
of brain, of race, of parentage would rather say that civilisation itself
was not born of but in reality gave rise to Luther and the scene at Worms.
The Reformation did not give private judgment; private judgment gave the
Reformation.
In all revolutions there is a mixture of the essential and the accidental.
During the long succession of the ordinary efforts of growing peoples
there are also from time to time unusual efforts to bring to an end
whatever of accident is most at variance with essential truth and reason
and sanity and honour. In the reformations of a growing people, whatever
the age in which they happen, whatever the religion or policy or conduct
of the age, leading spirits rebel against what is most oppressive and
resent what is most arrogant in that age; they reject what is most false
and laugh out of court what is most ridiculous. In the sixteenth century
men felt no special or inherent resentment to arrogance because it lifted
its head in Rome; they looked on the so-called miracle of
transubstantiation with no special or peculiar incredulity; their sense of
humour was not necessarily tickled by the idea that a soul leaped out of
purgatory when a coin clinked in Tetzel's box. Those were matters of
accident and circumstance; they were simply the most intolerable or
incredible or preposterous items of the century. Given other preceding
accidents--another Deity, or one appearing in another century or arising
in another people; another emperor than Constantine; other soldiers than
Constantine's--and the sixteenth-century items of oppression and falsehood
would have been there, it is true, but they would have been other than
they were.
We are often told that great movements come quickly, and are the peculiar
work of heroes. We are told, indeed, that from time to time mankind
degenerates into a mass of dry fuel, and that at the fitting moment a hero
descends, as a torch, and sets the mass on fire. Nay, moreover, if we
doubt this teaching we are dead to poetic feeling and have lost our
spiritual ideals. Happily, however, if phantasy dies, poetry still lives.
Leaders and led, teachers and taught, are all changing and always
changing; but no change brings a lessened poetic susceptibility or a
lessened poetic impulse. If, in future, historians and critics come to see
that the organisation and bodily proclivity and parentage of men have
really much to do with men, let us nevertheless be comforted--the ether
men breathe will be no less ample, the air no less divine. Every age is
transitional--not this or that--and the ages are bound together by
unbroken sequence. As with the movements so is it with the leaders: they
are in touch with each other as well as in touch with their followers. All
ages have some men who are bolder than others, or more reflective than
others, or more courageous, or more active. At certain epochs in history
there have been men who combined many high qualities, and who in several
ways stood in front of their time. Wyclif was not separated from his
fellows by any deep gulf, neither was he, as regards time, the first in
his movement, but no leader ever sprang so far in front of the led.
General leaders appear first, and afterwards, when the lines of cleavage
are clearer, special leaders arise. Wyclif was a general leader, and
therefore had many things to do. He did them all well. He was a scholar, a
theologian, a writer, a preacher. It is his attitude to his age and to all
ages, and to national growth, which interests us--not his particular
writing, or his preaching, or his detailed views. He propounded, he
defined, he lighted up, he animated, he fought. In one capacity or in two
Wyclif might have soared to a loftier height and have shone a grander
figure. But he did what was most needed to be done then and there. The
time was not ripe, and it did not lie in Wyclif to make it ripe, for the
Reformation, but he showed the way to the Reformation; he introduced its
introducers and led its leaders. The special leaders appeared in due time,
and they also were the product of their time. An Erasmus shed more light
than others on burning problems; a Calvin formulated more incisively than
his fellows; a Luther fought more defiantly; and, a little later, a Knox
roused the laggards with fiercer speech. It is interesting to note that
the fighters and the speakers in all movements and at all times come most
quickly to the front; it is for them that the multitude shouts its loudest
huzzas and the historian writes his brightest pages. But let us not forget
this one lesson from history and physiology: it is not given--or but
rarely given--to any one man to do all these things, to innovate, to
illuminate, to formulate, to fight, to rouse; it is certainly not given to
any one man to do all with equal power, and certainly not all at once. For
there is a sum-total of brain-force, not in the individual only, but in
the community and in the epoch. In one stream it is powerful; if it be
divided in several streams each stream is weaker. It was a theological
torrent at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a literary torrent at
the century's close. We have (perhaps it is for our good) several streams,
we have however, we all hope, a good total to divide. Curiously, too, the
most clear-sighted of leaders never see the end, never indeed see far into
the future of their movement. The matters and forces which go to form a
revolution are many and complex, reformers when striving to improve a
world often end in forming a party. If the leaders are clear-sighted, the
party will be continuous, large, long-lived; dim-sighted enthusiasts, even
when for the moment successful, lead a discontinuous, short-lived,
spasmodic crowd. Sometimes a leader steps forth clear and capable, but
the multitude continues to sleep. Wyclif, for example, called on his
generation to follow him in a new and better path. He seemed to call in
vain. In the sixteenth century men were awake, stirring, resolved; but no
leaders were ready. Fortunately the people marched well although they had
no captains to speak of. The age was heroic although it had no conspicuous
heroes.
Although in its forms, its beliefs, its opinions, its policy, its conduct,
there was much that was accidental, it was nevertheless inevitable and
essential that the Reformation should come. It mattered not whether this
thing had been done or that; whether this particular leader led or that;
whether this or that concession had been made at Rome. If Erasmus could
not fight Luther could. If Rome could concede nothing, much could be torn
from her. There is, indeed, much fighting and tearing in history:
complacent persons, loftily indifferent to organisation, and race, and
long antecedent, are astonished that men should fight, or should fight
with their bodies, or that, when fighting they should actually kill each
other. In all times, alas, the fittest, not the wisest, has prevailed--and
the fittest, alas, has been cruel. In the seventeenth century Parliament
and Charles Stuart fought each other by roughest bodily methods, and
Parliament, proving victorious, killed Charles. Had Charles conquered, and
could Parliament have been reduced to one neck or a dozen, we may be quite
sure that the one neck or the dozen would have been severed on the block.
When the thousand fermenting elements came together in the sixteenth
century cauldron, no number of men, certainly no one man, certainly not
Henry, could do much to hinder or to help on the seething process. This of
course was not Henry's view. He believed himself to be--gave himself out
to be--the fountain of truth. We know that he and an _admiring_ (not an
_abject_) Parliament proposed an Act to abolish diversity of opinion on
religious matters. We know too, that while he graciously permitted his
subjects to read the Word of God, he commanded them to adopt the opinions
of the king. It was indeed cheap compulsion, for he and the vast mass of
his subjects held similar opinions. Nevertheless, it is true that Henry,
with characteristic sagacity, turned to the right spot and at the right
moment when the cauldron threatened to boil over, or possibly to explode.
At a critical epoch he helped to avert bloodshed; for in this island there
was no war of peasants, or princes, or theologians.
Those who say that the great divorce question brought about or even
accelerated the Reformation, are those who see or wish to see the bubbles
only, and cannot, or will not see the stream--its depth and strength,--on
which the bubbles float. For the six-wives matter was in reality a bubble,
large it is true, prismatic, many-coloured, interesting, visible
throughout Europe, minutely gossiped over on every hearth. If King Henry,
however, had had no wife at all, the Reformation would have come no more
slowly than it did; if he had had, like King Solomon, seven hundred wives,
it would have come no more quickly. Henry was not himself a reformer, and
but little likely to lead reformers. Under a fitful and petulant exterior
the king was a cold, calculating, self-remembering man. The reformers were
a self-forgetting, passionate, often a frenzied party, and as a rule,
firebrands do not follow icebergs. If imperious circumstance loosened
Henry's moorings to Rome, he had no more notion of drifting towards
Augsburg or Geneva, than, a little later, his daughter Elizabeth had of
drifting to Edinburgh and Knox. Henry had no deep attachment, but he clung
to the old religion, chiefly perhaps because it was old, as much as he
could cling to anything; he had no deep hatreds, but, as heartily as his
nature permitted, he detested the new. He would have disliked it all the
more, had that been possible, could he have looked with interpretative
glance backward to the seed-time of Wyclif's era, or forward to the ripe
harvest of the seventeenth century. Could it have been made plain to Henry
that he was helping to put a sword into a Puritan's hand and bring a
King's head to the block, he would have had himself whipped at the tomb of
Catharine of Aragon, and would have thrown his crown at the Pope's feet.
He assumed the headship of the English Church, it is true; but even good
Catholics throughout Europe did not then so completely as now accept the
supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, and central ideas had not then so
completely swallowed up the territorial. If Henry had not taken the
headship of the English Church when he did, the Church would probably have
had no head at all, and religious teaching in this country would have
fared much as it fared in Switzerland and Scotland and North Germany. As
it was, Henry simply believed himself to be another Pope, and London to be
another Rome. He, the English Pope, and the Pope at Rome would, for the
most part, work together like brothers--work for the diffusion of the
_one_ truth (which all sorts and conditions of Popes believe they
possess), and work therefore for the good of all people.
Had the great European religious movement reached our island in any other
reign than Henry's it would not have run quite the same course it did. Of
all the Kings who have ruled over us Henry VIII. was the only King who was
at the same time willing enough, able enough, educated enough (he had
been trained to be an Archbishop), and pious enough to be, at any rate,
the first head of a great Church.
But it is said: "Look at the destruction of the religious houses; surely
that was the work of heresy and greed." Henry had no heresy in his nature,
but he was not without greed, and as he was certainly extravagant, he had
therefore the stronger incentives to exaction. But in our history the
foible of a King avails but little when it clashes with the conscience,
the ideal, the will of a people. Henry's greed, moreover, whatever its
strength, was less strong than his conservatism, less strong than his
piety. Stronger, too, than all these combined was his boundless love of
popularity--a love which alone would have preserved the monasteries could
the monasteries have been preserved by any single man. But new ideas and
new religious ideals had come in, and the new religious ideals and the old
religious houses could not flourish together. The existence of those
houses had long been threatened. One hundred years before, Parliament had
more than once seriously discussed the appropriation of ecclesiastical
funds to military purposes. Cardinal Morton, after impartial inquiry,
contemplated sweeping changes. Wolsey, a good Catholic, had suppressed
numerous houses. It is interesting to know that at one period of his life
Sir Thomas More thought of retiring into a religious house, but after
carefully studying monastic life he gave up the project. It is not
necessary to sift and resift the evidence touching the morality of the
monasteries. Probably those institutions were not so black as their
enemies, new or old, have painted them, nor so white as they appear in the
eyes of their modern friends. But whether they were fragments of Hades
thrust up from below, or fragments of the celestial regions let down from
above, or whatever else they were, their end was come. Many causes were at
work. They were coming into collision with the rapidly growing modern
social life--a life more complex than at any time before, more complex in
its roots, its growths, its products, and its needs. The newer social life
had developed a passionate love of knowledge; it had formed a loftier
ideal of domestic life. It pondered too over our economic problems, and
disliked the ceaseless accumulation of land and wealth in ecclesiastical
hands. Does any one imagine that a close network of institutions, which
were at any rate not models of virtue; institutions which hated knowledge
and thrust it out of doors; which directly or indirectly cast a slur on
the growing domestic ideal; which told the awakening descendants of
Scandinavian and Norseman and Saxon, that their women were unclean--that
their mothers and daughters were "snares;" does anyone imagine that such a
network could be permitted to entangle and strangle modern life? It has
already been said that the newer social ideas were destined to arise, and
that therefore the older religious houses were doomed to fall. It mattered
little the particular year in which they fell; it mattered little who
seemed to deal the final blow. Many centuries before, human nature being
what it was, and social conditions what they were, quiet retreats had met
a want--they were fittest to live and they lived. But a succession of
centuries brought change--a little in human nature, much in social
conditions, very much in thought and opinion, and the retreats, the inner
life and opinions of which had not kept pace with life outside, were no
longer needed, no longer fittest, and they fell. Henry did not destroy
them. Catholicism, which neither made them pure nor made them impure, was
unable to preserve them. Could the long buried bones of their founders
have come to life again and have put on the newer flesh, thought, with
newer brain, the newer thought, they would have found quite other outlets
for their energy, leisure and wealth. It is so with all founders and all
institutions. It is so at this moment with the institutions which were
born of the Reformation itself. Naturalists tell us that the jelly-like
mass, the amaeba, embraces everything, both the useful and the useless,
that comes in its way, but that in time it relaxes its embrace on the
useless. So the civilisation of a growing people is like a huge amaeba,
which slowly enfolds men and ideas, and incidents, and systems, and then
sooner or later it disenfolds the unsuitable and the worn-out.
QUEEN ELIZABETH AND QUEEN MARY.
NOTE X.
Few rulers, few persons indeed, have ever been so much alike as our two
rulers Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth. No man was ever so like
Henry as was the woman Elizabeth; no woman ever resembled Elizabeth so
closely as did the man Henry. Both father and daughter were extreme
examples of the intellectual and unimpassioned temperament. High capacity,
acute perception, clear insight, correct inference were present in both.
Both, too, were capricious, fault-finding, querulous and vain. Both,
moreover, had their preferences and their dislikes. Both, too, felt and
showed resentment when their vanity was wounded. But in neither of them,
it may be truly affirmed, was there any consuming passion--any fervent
love, or invincible hatred, or fierce jealousy, or overwhelming anger.