accident, very striking, very effective, of short duration. We have
already seen that the Norman race was one of these. Tyranny in civil
government (which accompanied the Reformation) was another.
A claim to absolute monarchy is one of the commonest and most enduring
of historical things. Countless centuries of the old Empires of the
East were passed under such a claim, the Roman Empire was based upon
it; the old Russian State was made by it, French society luxuriated in
it for one magnificent century, from the accession of Louis XIV. till
Fontenoy. It is the easiest and (when it works) the most prompt of all
instruments.
But the sense of an absolute civil government at the moment of the
Reformation was something very different. It was a demand, an appetite,
proceeding from the whole community, a worship of civil authority. It
was deification of the State and of law; it was the adoration of the
Executive.
“This governs me; therefore I will worship it and do all it tells me.”
Such is the formula for the strange passion which has now and then
seized great bodies of human beings intoxicated by splendor and by the
vivifying effects of command. Like all manias (for it is a mania) this
exaggerated passion is hardly comprehended once it is past. Like all
manias, while it is present it overrides every other emotion.
Europe, in the time of which I speak, suffered such a mania. The free
cities manifested that disease quite as much as the great monarchical
states. In Rome itself the temporal power of the Papal sovereign was
then magnificent beyond all past parallel. In Geneva Calvin was a god.
In Spain Charles and Philip governed two worlds without question. In
England the Tudor dynasty was worshipped blindly. Men might and did
rebel against a particular government, but it was only to set up
something equally absolute in its place. Not the form but the fact of
government was adored.
I will not waste the reader’s time in any discussion upon the causes of
that astonishing political fever. It must suffice to say that for a
moment it hypnotized the whole world. It would have been
incomprehensible to the Middle Ages. It was incomprehensible to the
nineteenth century. It wholly occupied the sixteenth. If we understand
it, we largely understand what made the success of the Reformation
possible.
Well, then, the increasing discontent of the masses against the
decaying forms of the Middle Ages, and the increasing irritation
against the temporal government and the organization of the Church,
came to a head just at that moment when civil government was worshipped
as an awful and almost divine thing.
Into such an atmosphere was launched the last and the strongest of the
overt protests against the old social scheme, and in particular against
the existing power of the Papacy, especially upon its economic side.
The name most prominently associated with the crisis is that of Martin
Luther, an Augustinian monk, German by birth and speech, and one of
those exuberant sensual, rather inconsequential, characters which so
easily attract hearty friendships, and which can never pretend to
organization or command, though certainly to creative power. What he
precisely meant or would do, no man could tell, least of all himself.
He was “out” for protest and he floated on the crest of the general
wave of change. That he ever intended, nay, that he could ever have
imagined, a disruption of the European Unity is impossible.
Luther (a voice, no leader) was but one of many: had he never lived,
the great bursting wave would have crashed onward much the same. One
scholar after another (and these of every blood and from every part of
Europe) joined in the upheaval. The opposition of the old monastic
training to the newly revived classics, of the ascetic to the new pride
of life, of the logician to the mystic, all these in a confused whirl
swept men of every type into the disruption. One thing only united
them. They were all inflamed with a vital necessity for change. Great
names which in the ultimate challenge refused to destroy and helped to
preserve—the greatest is that of Erasmus; great names which even appear
in the roll of that of the Catholic martyrs—the blessed Thomas More is
the greatest of these—must here be counted with the names of men like
the narrow Calvin on the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the other.
Not one ardent mind in the first half of the sixteenth century but was
swept into the stream.
Now all this would and must have been quieted in the process of time,
the mass of Christendom would have settled back into unity, the
populace would have felt instinctively the risk they ran of spoliation
by the rich and powerful, if the popular institutions of Christendom
broke down: the masses would have all swung round to solidifying
society after an upheaval (it is their function): we should have
attained repose and Europe, united again, would have gone forward as
she did after the rocking of four hundred years before—but for that
other factor of which I have spoken, the passion which this eager
creative moment felt for the absolute in civil government—that craving
for the something godlike which makes men worship a flag, a throne or a
national hymn.
This it was which caught up and, in the persons of particular men, used
the highest of the tide. Certain princes in the Germanies (who had, of
all the groups of Europe, least grasped the meaning of authority)
befriended here one heresiarch and there another. The very fact that
the Pope of Rome stood for one of these absolute governments put other
absolute governments against him. The wind of the business rose; it
became a quarrel of sovereigns. And the sovereigns decided, and
powerful usurping nobles or leaders decided, the future of the herd.
Two further characters appeared side by side in the earthquake that was
breaking up Europe.
The first was this: the tendency to fall away from European unity
seemed more and more marked in those outer places which lay beyond the
original limits of the old Roman Empire, and notably in the Northern
Netherlands and in Northern Germany—where men easily submitted to the
control of wealthy merchants and of hereditary landlords.
The second was this: a profound distrust of the new movement, a
reaction against it, a feeling that moral anarchy was too profitable to
the rich and the cupidinous, began at first in a dull, later in an
angry way, to stir the masses of the populace throughout _all_
Christendom.
The stronger the old Latin sense of human equality was, the more the
populace felt this, the more they instinctively conceived of the
Reformation as something that would rob them of some ill-understood but
profound spiritual guarantee against slavery, exploitation and
oppression.
There began a sort of popular grumbling against the Reformers, who were
now already schismatic: their rich patrons fell under the same
suspicion. By the time the movement had reached a head and by the time
the central power of the Church had been openly defied by the German
princes, this protest took, as in France and England and the valley of
the Rhone (the ancient seats of culture), a noise like the undertone of
the sea before bad weather. In the outer Germanies it was not a defence
of Christendom at all, but a brutish cry for more food. But everywhere
the populace stirred.
A general observer, cognizant of what was to come, would have been
certain at that moment that the populace would rise. When it rose
_intelligently_ the movement against the Church and civilization would
come to nothing. The Revolt elsewhere—in half barbaric Europe—would
come to no more than the lopping off of outer and insignificant things.
The Baltic Plain, sundry units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia,
probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in
Switzerland and Savoy and France and the Pyrenees, which had suffered
from lack of instruction and could easily be recovered—these would be
affected. The outer parts, which had never been within the pale of the
Roman Empire might go. But the soul and intelligence of Europe would be
kept sound; its general body would reunite and Christendom would once
more reappear whole and triumphant. It would have reconquered these
outer parts at its leisure: and Poland was a sure bastion. We should,
within a century, have been ourselves once more: Christian men.
So it would have been—but for one master tragedy, which changed the
whole scheme. Of the four great remaining units of Western
civilization, Iberia, Italy, Britain, Gaul, one, at this critical
moment, broke down by a tragic accident and lost continuity. It was
hardly intended. It was a consequence of error much more than an act of
will. But it had full effect.
The breakdown of Britain and her failure to resist disruption was the
chief event of all. It made the Reformation permanent. It confirmed a
final division in Europe.
By a curious accident, one province, extraneous to the Empire, Ireland,
heroically preserved what the other extraneous provinces, the Germanies
and Scandinavia, were to lose. In spite of the loss of Britain, and cut
off by that loss from direct succor, Ireland preserved the tradition of
civilization.
It must be my next business to describe the way in which Britain failed
in the struggle, and, at the hands of the King, and of a little group
of avaricious men (such as the Howards among the gentry, and the Cecils
among the adventurers) changed for the worse the history of Europe.
IX
THE DEFECTION OF BRITAIN
One thing stands out in the fate of modern Europe: the profound
cleavage due to the Reformation. One thing made that wound (it was
almost mortal) so deep and _lasting_: the failure of one ancient
province of civilization, and one only, to keep the Faith: this
province whereof I write: Britain.
The capital event, the critical moment, in the great struggle of the
Faith against the Reformation, was the defection of Britain.
It is a point which the modern historian, who is still normally
anti-Catholic, does not and cannot make. Yet the defection of Britain
from the Faith of Europe three hundred years ago is certainly the most
important historical event in the last thousand years: between the
saving of Europe from the barbarians and these our own times. It is
perhaps the most important historical event since the triumph of the
Catholic Church under Constantine.
Let me recapitulate the factors of the problem as they would be seen by
an impartial observer from some great distance in time, or in space, or
in mental attitude. Let me put them as they would appear to one quite
indifferent to, and remote from, the antagonists.
To such an observer the history of Europe would be that of the great
Roman Empire passing through the transformation I have described: its
mind first more and more restless, then more and more tending to a
certain conclusion, and that conclusion the Catholic Church.
To summarize what has gone before: the Catholic Church becomes by the
fifth century the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe.
It next suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical, of
the Eastern schism. It is of its nature perpetually subject to assault;
from within, because it deals with matters not open to positive proof;
from without, because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites,
who are not of our civilization, are naturally its enemies.
The Roman Empire of the West, in which the purity and the unity of this
soul were preserved from generation to generation, declined in its body
during the Dark Ages—say, up to and rather beyond the year 1000. It
became coarsened and less in its material powers. It lost its central
organization, the Imperial Court (which was replaced first by
provincial military leaders or “kings,” then, later, by a mass of local
lordships jumbled into more or less national groups). In building, in
writing, in cooking, in clothing, in drawing, in sculpture, the Roman
Empire of the West (which is ourselves) forgot all but the fundamentals
of its arts—but it expanded so far as its area is concerned. A whole
belt of barbaric Germany received the Roman influence—Baptism and the
Mass. With the Creed there came to these outer parts reading and
writing, building in brick and stone—all the material essentials of our
civilization—and what is characteristic of that culture, the power of
thinking more clearly.
It is centuries before this slow digestion of the barbarian reached
longitude ten degrees east, and the Scandinavian peninsula. But a
thousand years after Our Lord it has reached even these, and there
remains between the unbroken tradition of our civilization in the West
and the schismatic but Christian civilization of the Greek Church,
nothing but a belt of paganism from the corner of the Baltic southward,
which belt is lessened, year after year, by the armed efforts and the
rational dominance of Latin culture. Our Christian and Roman culture
proceeds continuously eastward, mastering the uncouth.
After this general picture of a civilization dominating and mastering
in its material decline a vastly greater area than it had known in the
height of its material excellence—this sort of expansion in the
dark—the impartial observer, whom we have supposed, would remark a sort
of dawn.
That dawn came with the eleventh century; 1000-1100. The Norman race,
the sudden invigoration of the Papacy, the new victories in Spain, at
last the first Crusade, mark a turn in the tide of material decline,
and that tide works very rapidly towards a new and intense civilization
which we call that of the Middle Ages: that high renewal which gives
Europe a second and most marvelous life, which is a late reflowering of
Rome, but of Rome revivified with the virtue and the humor of the
Faith.
The second thing that the observer would note in so general a picture
would be the peculiar exception formed within it by the group of large
islands lying to the North and West of the Continent. Of these the
larger, Britain, had been a true Roman Province; but very early in the
process—in the middle and end of the fifth century—it had on the first
assault of the barbarians been cut off for more than the lifetime of a
man. Its gate had been held by the barbarian. Then it was
re-Christianized almost as thoroughly as though even its Eastern part
had never lost the authority of civilization. The Mission of St.
Augustine recaptured Britain—but Britain is remarkable in the history
of civilization for the fact that alone of civilized lands it needed to
be recaptured at all. The western island of the two, the smaller
island, Ireland, presented another exception.
It was not compelled to the Christian culture, as were the German
barbarians of the Continent, by arms. No Charlemagne with his Gallic
armies forced it tardily to accept baptism. It was not savage like the
Germanies; it was therefore under no necessity to go to school. It was
not a morass of shifting tribes; it was a nation. But in a most
exceptional fashion, though already possessed, and perhaps because so
possessed, of a high pagan culture of its own, it accepted within the
lifetime of a man, and by spiritual influences alone, the whole spirit
of the Creed. The civilization of the Roman West was accepted by
Ireland, not as a command nor as an influence, but as a discovery.
Now let this peculiar fate of the two islands to the north and west of
the Continent remain in the observer’s mind, and he will note, when the
shock of what is called “the Reformation” comes, new phenomena
attaching to those islands, cognate to their early history.
Those phenomena are the thesis which I have to present in the pages
that follow.
What we call “the Reformation” was essentially the reaction of the
barbaric, the ill-tutored and the isolated places external to the old
and deep-rooted Roman civilization, against the influences of that
civilization. The Reformation was not racial. Even if there were such a
physical thing as a “Teutonic Race” (and there is nothing of the kind),
the Reformation shows no coincidence with that race. The Reformation is
simply the turning-back of that tide of Roman culture which, for five
hundred years, had set steadily forward and had progressively dominated
the insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the
confused by the clear-headed. It was a sort of protest by the conquered
against a moral and intellectual superiority which offended them. The
Slavs of Bohemia joined in that sincere protest of the lately and
insufficiently civilized, quite as strongly as, and even earlier than,
the vague peoples of the Sandy Heaths along the Baltic. The
Scandinavian, physically quite different from these tribes of the
Baltic Plain, comes into the game. Wretched villages in the mark of
Brandenburg, as Slavonic in type as the villages of Bohemia, revolt as
naturally against exalted and difficult mystery as do the isolated
villages of the Swedish valleys or the isolated rustics of the Cevennes
or the Alps. The revolt is confused, instinctive, and therefore
enjoying the sincere motive which accompanies such risings, but
deprived of unity and of organizing power. There has never been a fixed
Protestant creed. The common factor has been, and is, reaction against
the traditions of Europe.
Now the point to seize is this:
Inimical as such a revolt was to souls or (to speak upon the mere
historical plane) to civilization, bad as it was that the tide of
culture should have begun to ebb from the far regions which it had once
so beneficently flooded, the Reformation, that is, the reaction against
the unity, the discipline, and the clear thought of Europe, would never
have counted largely in human affairs had it been confined to the
external fringe of the civilized world. That fringe would probably have
been reconquered. The inherent force attaching to reality and to the
stronger mind should have led to its recovery. The Northern Germanies
were, as a fact, reconquered when Richelieu stepped in and saved them
from their Southern superiors. But perhaps it would not have been
reconquered. Perhaps it would have lapsed quite soon into its original
paganism. At any rate European culture would have continued undivided
and strong without these outer regions. Unfortunately a far worse thing
happened.
Europe was rent and has remained divided.
The disaster was accomplished through forces I will now describe.
Though the revolt was external to the foundations of Europe, to the
ancient provinces of the Empire, yet an external consequence of that
revolt arose within the ancient provinces. It may be briefly told. _The
wealthy took advantage within the heart of civilization itself of this
external revolt against order_; for it is always to the advantage of
the wealthy to deny general conceptions of right and wrong, to question
a popular philosophy and to weaken the drastic and immediate power of
the human will, organized throughout the whole community. It is always
in the nature of _great_ wealth to be insanely tempted (though it
should know from active experience how little wealth can give), to push
on to more and more domination over the bodies of men—and it can do so
best by attacking fixed social restraints.
The landed squires then, and the great merchants, powerfully supported
by the Jewish financial communities in the principal towns, felt
that—with the Reformation—their opportunity had come. The largest
fortune holders, the nobles, the merchants of the ports and local
capitals even in Gaul (that nucleus and stronghold of ordered human
life) licked their lips. Everywhere in Northern Italy, in Southern
Germany, upon the Rhine, wherever wealth had congested in a few hands,
the chance of breaking with the old morals was a powerful appeal to the
wealthy; and, therefore, throughout Europe, even in its most ancient
seats of civilization, the outer barbarian had allies.
These rich men, whose avarice betrayed Europe from within, had no
excuse. _Theirs_ was not any dumb instinctive revolt like that of the
Outer Germanies, the Outer Slavs, nor the neglected mountain valleys,
against order and against clear thought, with all the hard consequences
that clear thought brings. _They_ were in no way subject to enthusiasm
for the vaguer emotions roused by the Gospel or for the more turgid
excitements derivable from Scripture and an uncorrected orgy of
prophecy. _They_ were “on the make.” The rich in Montpelier and Nîmes,
a knot of them in Rome itself, many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris,
enlisted intellectual aid for the revolt, flattered the atheism of the
Renaissance, supported the strong inflamed critics of clerical
misliving, and even winked solemnly at the lunatic inspirations of
obscure men and women filled with “visions.” They did all these things
as though their object was religious change. But their true object was
money.
One group, and one alone, of the European nations was too recently
filled with combat against vile non-Christian things to accept any
parley with this anti-Christian turmoil. That unit was the Iberian
Peninsula. It is worthy of remark, especially on the part of those who
realize that the sword fits the hand of the Church and that Catholicism
is never more alive than when it is in arms, I say it is worthy of
remark by these that Spain and Portugal through the very greatness of
an experience still recent when the Reformation broke, lost the chance
of combat. There came indeed, from Spain (but from the Basque nation
there) that weapon of steel, the Society of Jesus, which St. Ignatius
formed, and which, surgical and military, saved the Faith, and
therefore Europe. But the Iberian Peninsula rejecting as one whole and
with contempt and with abhorrence (and rejecting rightly) any
consideration of revolt—even among its rich men—thereby lost its
opportunity for combat. It did not enjoy the religious wars which
revivified France, and it may be urged that Spain would be the stronger
today had it fallen to her task, as it did to the general populace of
Gaul, to come to hand-grips with the Reformation at home, to test it,
to know it, to dominate it, to bend the muscles upon it, and to
reemerge triumphant from the struggle.
I say, then, that there was present in the field against the Church a
powerful ally for the Reformers: and that ally was the body of immoral
rich who hoped to profit by a general break in the popular organization
of society. The atheism and the wealth, the luxury and the sensuality,
the scholarship and aloofness of the Renaissance answered, over the
heads of the Catholic populace, the call of barbarism. The Iconoclasts
of greed joined hands with the Iconoclasts of blindness and rage and
with the Iconoclasts of academic pride.
Nevertheless, even with such allies, barbarism would have failed, the
Reformation would today be but an historical episode without fruit,
Europe would still be Christendom, had not there been added the
decisive factor of all—which was the separation of Britain.
Now how did Britain go, and why was the loss of Britain of such capital
importance?
The loss of Britain was of such capital importance because Britain
alone of those who departed, was Roman, and therefore capable of
endurance and increase. And _why_ did Britain fail in that great
ordeal? It is a question harder to answer.
The province of Britain was not a very great one in area or in numbers,
when the Reformation broke out. It was, indeed, very wealthy for its
size, as were the Netherlands, but its mere wealth does not account for
the fundamental importance of the loss of Britain to the Faith in the
sixteenth century. The real point was that one and only one of the old
Roman provinces with their tradition of civilization, letters,
persuasive power, multiple soul—one and only one went over to the
barbaric enemy and gave that enemy its aid. That one was Britain. And
the consequence of its defection was the perpetuation and extension of
an increasingly evil division within the structure of the West.