because Britain is “Teutonic,” is to talk nonsense. It is to explain a
real problem by inventing unreal words. Britain is not “Teutonic,” nor
does the word “Teutonic” itself mean anything definite. To say that
Britain revolted because the seeds of revolt were stronger in her than
in any ancient province of Europe, is to know nothing of history. The
seeds of revolt were in her then as they were in every other community;
as they must be in every individual who may find any form of discipline
a burden which he is tempted, in a moment of disorder, to lay down. But
to pretend that England and the lowlands of Scotland, to pretend that
the Province of Britain in our general civilization was more ready for
the change than the infected portions of Southern Gaul, or the humming
towns of Northern Italy, or the intense life of Hainult, or Brabant, is
to show great ignorance of the European past.
Well, then, how did Britain break away?
I beg the reader to pay a special attention to the next page or so. I
believe it to be of capital value in explaining the general history of
Europe, and I know it to be hardly ever told; or—if told at all—told
only in fragments.
England went because of three things. First, her Squires had already
become too powerful. In other words, the economic power of a small
class of wealthy men had grown, on account of peculiar insular
conditions, greater than was healthy for the community.
Secondly, England was, more than any other part of Western Europe (save
the Batavian March), [Footnote: I mean Belgium: that frontier of Roman
Influence upon the lower Rhine which so happily held out for the Faith
and just preserved it.] a series of markets and of ports, a place of
very active cosmopolitan influence, in which new opportunities for the
corrupt, new messages of the enthusiastic, were frequent.
In the third place, that curious phenomena on which I dwelt in the last
chapter, the superstitious attachment of citizens to the civil power,
to awe of, and devotion to, the monarch, was exaggerated in England as
nowhere else.
Now put these three things together, especially the first and third
(for the second was both of minor importance and more superficial), and
you will appreciate why England fell.
One small, too wealthy class, tainted with the atheism that always
creeps into wealth long and securely enjoyed, was beginning to possess
too much of English land. It would take far too long to describe here
what the process had been. It is true that the absolute monopoly of the
soil, the gripping and the strangling of the populace by landlords, is
a purely Protestant development. Nothing of that kind had happened or
would have been conceived of as possible in pre-Reformation England;
but still something like a quarter of the land (or a little less) had
_already_ before the Reformation got into the full possession of one
small class which had also begun to encroach upon the judiciary, in
some measure to supplant the populace in local law-making, and quite
appreciably to supplant the King in central law-making.
Let me not be misunderstood; the England of the fifteenth century, the
England of the generation just before the Reformation, was not an
England of Squires; it was not an England of landlords; it was still an
England of Englishmen. The towns were quite free. To this day old
boroughs nearly always show a great number of freeholds. The process by
which the later English aristocracy (now a plutocracy) had grown up,
was but in germ before the Reformation. Nor had that germ sprouted. But
for the Reformation it would not have matured. Sooner or later a
popular revolt (had the Faith revived) would have killed the growing
usurpation of the wealthy. But the germ was there; and the Reformation
coming just as it did, both was helped by the rich and helped them.
The slow acquisition of considerable power over the Courts of Law and
over the soil of the country by an oligarchy, imperfect though that
acquisition was as yet, already presented just after 1500 a
predisposing condition to the disease. It may be urged that if the
English people had fought the growing power of the Squires more
vigorously, the Squires would not have mastered them as they did,
during and on account of the religious revolution. Possibly; and the
enemies of the English people are quick to suggest that some native
sluggishness permitted the gradual weighing down of the social balance
in favor of the rich. But no one who can even pretend to know mediæval
England will say that the English consciously desired or willingly
permitted such a state of affairs to grow up. Successful foreign wars,
dynastic trouble, a recent and vigorous awakening of national
consciousness, which consciousness had centred in the wealthier
classes—all these combined to let the evil in without warning, and, on
the eve of the Reformation, a rich, avaricious class was already
empowered to act in Britain, ready to grasp, as all the avaricious
classes were throughout the Western world, at the opportunity to revolt
against that Faith which has ever suspected, constrained and reformed
the tyranny of wealth.
Now add to this the strange, but at that time very real, worship of
government as a fetish. This spirit did not really strengthen
government: far from it. A superstition never strengthens its object,
nor even makes of the supposed power of that object a reality. But
though it did not give real power to the long intention of the prince,
it gave to the momentary word of the prince a fantastic power. In such
a combination of circumstances—nascent oligarchy, but the prince
worshipped—you get, holding the position of prince, Henry VIII., a
thorough Tudor, that is, a man weak almost to the point of
irresponsibility where his passions were concerned; violent from that
fundamental weakness which, in the absence of opposition, ruins things
as effectively as any strength.
No executive power in Europe was less in sympathy with the revolt
against civilization than was the Tudor family. Upon the contrary,
Henry VII., his son, and his two granddaughters if anything exceeded in
their passion for the old order of the Western world. But at the least
sign of resistance, Mary who burnt, Elizabeth who intrigued, Henry,
their father, who pillaged, Henry, their grandfather, who robbed and
saved, were one. To these characters slight resistance was a spur; with
strong manifold opposition they were quite powerless to deal. Their
minds did not grip (for their minds, though acute, were not large) but
their passions shot. And one may compare them, when their passions of
pride, of lust, of jealousy, of doting, of avarice or of facile power
were aroused, to vehement children. Never was there a ruling family
less statesmanlike; never one less full of stuff and of creative power.
Henry, urged by an imperious young woman, who had gained control of
him, desired a divorce from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, grown old
for him. The Papal Court temporized with him and opposed him. He was
incapable of negotiation and still more incapable of foresight. His
energy, which was “of an Arabian sort,” blasted through the void,
because a void was there: none would then withstand the Prince. Of
course, it seemed to him no more than one of these recurrent quarrels
with the mundane power of Rome, which all Kings (and Saints among them)
had engaged in for many hundred years. All real powers thus conflict in
all times. But, had he known it (and he did not know it), the moment
was fatally inopportune for playing that game. Henry never meant to
break permanently with the unity of Christendom. A disruption of that
unity was probably inconceivable to him. He meant to “exercise
pressure.” All his acts from the decisive Proclamation of September 19,
1530, onwards prove it. But the moment was the moment of a
breaking-point throughout Europe, and he, Henry, blundered into
disaster without knowing what the fullness of that moment was. He was
devout, especially to the Blessed Sacrament. He kept the Faith for
himself, and he tried hard to keep it for others. But having lost
unity, he let in what he loathed. Not, so long as he lived, could those
doctrines of the Reformers triumph here: but he had compromised with
their spirit, and at his death a strong minority—perhaps a tenth of
England, more of London—was already hostile to the Creed.
It was the same thing with the suppression of the monasteries. Henry
meant no effect on religion by that loot: he, none the less, destroyed
it. He intended to enrich the Crown: he ruined it. In the matter of
their financial endowment, an economic crisis, produced by the unequal
growth of economic powers, had made the monastic foundation ripe for
re-settlement. Religious orders were here wealthy without reason—poor
in spirit and numbers, but rich in land; there impoverished without
reason—rich in popularity and spiritual power, but poor in land. The
dislocation, which all institutions necessarily suffer on the economic
side through the mere efflux of time, inclined every government in
Europe to a re-settlement of religious endowment. Everywhere it took
place; everywhere it involved dissolution and restoration.
But Henry did not re-settle. He plundered and broke. He used the
contemporary idolatry of executive power just as much at Reading or in
the Blackfriars of London, where unthinking and immediate popular
feeling was with him, as at Glastonbury where it was against him, as in
Yorkshire where it was in arms, as in Galway where there was no bearing
with it at all. There was no largeness in him nor any comprehension of
complexity, and when in this Jacobin, unexampled way, he had simply got
rid of that which he should have restored and transformed, of what
effect was that vast act of spoliation? It paralyzed the Church. It
ultimately brought down the Monarchy.
From a fourth to a third of the economic power over the means of
production in England, which had been vested top-heavily in the
religious foundations—here, far too rich, there, far too poor—Henry got
by one enormous confiscation. Yet he made no permanent addition to the
wealth of _the Crown_. On the contrary, he started its decline. _The
land passed by an instinctive multiple process—but very rapidly—to the
already powerful class which had begun to dominate the villages_. Then,
when it was too late, the Tudors attempted to stem the tide. But the
thing was done. Upon the indifference which is always common to a
society long and profoundly Catholic and ignorant of heresy, or, having
conquered heresy, ignorant at any rate of struggle for the Faith, two
ardent minorities converged: the small minority of confused enthusiasts
who really did desire what they believed to be a restoration of
“primitive” Christianity: the much larger minority of men now grown
almost invincibly powerful in the economic sphere. The Squires, twenty
years after Henry’s death, had come to possess, through the ruin of
religion, _something like half the land of England_. With the rapidity
of a fungus growth the new wealth spread over the desolation of the
land. The enriched captured both the Universities, all the Courts of
Justice, most of the public schools. They won their great civil war
against the Crown. Within a century after Henry’s folly, they had
established themselves in the place of what had once been the monarchy
and central government of England. The impoverished Crown resisted in
vain; they killed one embarrassed King—Charles I., and they set up his
son, Charles II., as an insufficiently salaried puppet. Since their
victory over the Crown, they and the capitalists, who have sprung from
their avarice and their philosophy, and largely from their very loins,
have been completely masters of England.
Here the reader may say: “What! this large national movement to be
interpreted as the work of such minorities? A few thousand squires and
merchants backing a few more thousand enthusiasts, changed utterly the
mass of England?” Yes; to interpret it otherwise is to read history
backwards. It is to think that England then was what England later
became. There is no more fatal fault in the reading of history, nor any
illusion to which the human mind is more prone. To read the remote past
in the light of the recent past; to think the process of the one
towards the other “inevitable;” to regard the whole matter as a slow
inexorable process, independent of the human will, still suits the
materialist pantheism of our time. There is an inherent tendency in all
men to this fallacy of reading themselves into the past, and of
thinking their own mood a consummation at once excellent and necessary:
and most men who write of these things imagine a vaguely Protestant
Tudor England growing consciously Protestant in the England of the
Stuarts.
That is not history. It is history to put yourself by a combined effort
of reading and of imagination into the shoes of Tuesday, as though you
did not know what Wednesday was to be, and then to describe what
Tuesday was. England did not lose the Faith in 1550-1620 because she
was Protestant then. Rather, she is Protestant now because she then
lost the Faith.
Put yourself into the shoes of a sixteenth century Englishman in the
midst of the Reformation, and what do you perceive? A society wholly
Catholic in tradition, lax and careless in Catholic practice; irritated
or enlivened here and there by a few furious preachers, or by a few
enthusiastic scholars, at once devoted to and in terror of the civil
government; intensely national; in all the roots and traditions of its
civilization, Roman; impatient of the disproportion of society, and in
particular of economic disproportion in the religious aspect of
society, because the religious function, by the very definition of
Catholicism, by its very Creed, should be the first to redress
tyrannies. Upon that Englishman comes first, a mania for his King;
next, a violent economic revolution, which, in many parts, can be made
to seem an approach to justice; finally, a national appeal of the
strongest kind against the encroaching power of Spain.
When the work was done, say by 1620, the communication between England
and those parts of the ancient West, which were still furiously
resisting the storm, was cut. No spiritual force could move England
after the Armada and its effect, save what might arise spontaneously in
the many excited men who still believed (they continued to believe it
for fifty years) that the whole Church of Christ had gone wrong for
centuries; that its original could be restored and that personal
revelations were granted them for their guidance.
These visionaries were the Reformers; to these, souls still athirst for
spiritual guidance turned. They were a minority even at the end of the
sixteenth century, the last years of Elizabeth, but they were a
minority full of initiative and of action. With the turn of the century
(1600-1620) the last men who could remember Catholic training were very
old or dead. The new generation could turn to nothing but the new
spirit. For authority it could find nothing definite but a printed
book: a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. For teachers, nothing but
this minority, the Reformers. That minority, though remaining a
minority, leavened and at last controlled the whole nation: by the
first third of the seventeenth century Britain was utterly cut off from
the unity of Christendom and its new character was sealed. The Catholic
Faith was dead.
The governing class remained largely indifferent (as it still is) to
religion, yet it remained highly cultured. The populace drifted here,
into complete indifference, there, into orgiastic forms of worship. The
middle class went over in a solid body to the enemy. The barbarism of
the outer Germanies permeated it and transformed it. The
closer-reasoned, far more perverted and harder French heresy of Calvin
partly deflected the current—and a whole new society was formed and
launched. That was the English Reformation.
Its effect upon Europe was stupendous; for, though England was cut off,
England was still England. You could not destroy in a Roman province
the great traditions of municipality and letters. It was as though a
phalanx of trained troops had crossed the frontier in some border war
and turned against their former comrades. England lent, and has from
that day continuously lent, the strength of a great civilized tradition
to forces whose original initiative was directed against European
civilization and its tradition. The loss of Britain was the one great
wound in the body of the Western world. It is not yet healed.
Yet all this while that other island of the group to the Northwest of
Europe, that island which had never been conquered by armed
civilization as were the Outer Germanies, but had spontaneously
accepted the Faith, presented a contrasting exception. Against the loss
of Britain, which had been a Roman province, the Faith, when the smoke
of battle cleared off, could discover the astonishing loyalty of
Ireland. And over against this exceptional province—Britain—now lost to
the Faith, lay an equally exceptional and unique outer part which had
never been a Roman province, yet which now remained true to the
tradition of Roman men; it balanced the map like a counterweight. The
efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have exceeded in violence,
persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part or time of the
world. They have failed. As I cannot explain why they have failed, so I
shall not attempt to explain how and why the Faith in Ireland was saved
when the Faith in Britain went under. I do not believe it capable of an
historic explanation. It seems to me a phenomenon essentially
miraculous in character, not _generally_ attached (as are all
historical phenomena) to the general and divine purpose that governs
our large political events, but _directly_ and _specially_ attached. It
is of great significance; how great, men will be able to see many years
hence when another definite battle is joined between the forces of the
Church and her opponents. For the Irish race alone of all Europe has
maintained a perfect integrity and has kept serene, without internal
reactions and without their consequent disturbances, the soul of Europe
which is the Catholic Church.
I have now nothing left to set down but the conclusion of this
disaster: its spiritual result—an isolation of the soul; its political
result—a consequence of the spiritual—the prodigious release of energy,
the consequent advance of special knowledge, the domination of the few
under a competition left unrestrained, the subjection of the many, the
ruin of happiness, the final threat of chaos.
X
CONCLUSION
The grand effect of the Reformation was the isolation of the soul.
This was its fruit: from this all its consequences proceed: not only
those clearly noxious, which have put in jeopardy the whole of our
traditions and all our happiness, but those apparently advantageous,
especially in material things.
The process cannot be seen at work if we take a particular
date—especially too early a date—and call it the moment of the
catastrophe. There was a long interval of confusion and doubt, in which
it was not certain whether the catastrophe would be final or no, in
which its final form remained undetermined, and only upon the
conclusion of which could modern Europe with its new divisions, and its
new fates, be perceived clearly. The breach with authority began in the
very first years of the sixteenth century. It is not till the middle of
the seventeenth century at least, and even somewhat later, that the new
era begins.
For more than a hundred years the conception of the struggle as an
oecumenical struggle, as something affecting the whole body of Europe,
continued. The general upheaval, the revolt, which first shook the West
in the early years of the sixteenth century—to take a particular year,
the year 1517—concerned all our civilization, was everywhere debated,
produced an universal reaction met by as universal a resistance, for
three generations of men. No young man who saw the first outbreak of
the storm could imagine it even in old age, as a disruption of Europe.
No such man lived to see it more than half way through.
It was not till a corresponding date in the succeeding century—or
rather later—not till Elizabeth of England and Henry IV. of France were
dead (and all the protagonists, the Reformers on the one side, Loyola,
Neri, on the other, long dead) not till the career of Richelieu in the
one country and the beginnings of an aristocratic Parliament in England
were apparent, that the Reformation could clearly be seen to have
separated certain districts of our civilization from the general
traditions of the whole, and to have produced, in special regions and
sections of society, the peculiar Protestant type which was to mark the
future.
The work of the Reformation was accomplished, one may say, a little
after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. England in particular was
definitely Protestant by the decade 1620-1630—hardly earlier. The
French Huguenot body, though still confused with political effort, had
come to have a separate and real existence at about the same time. The
Oligarchy of Dutch merchants had similarly cut off their part of the
Low Countries from imperial rule, and virtually established their
independence. The North German Principalities and sundry smaller states
of the mountains (notably Geneva), had definitely received the new
stamp. As definitely France, Bohemia, the Danube, Poland and Italy and
all the South were saved.
Though an armed struggle was long to continue, though the North Germans
were nearly recaptured by the Imperial Power and only saved by French
policy, though we were to have a reflex of it here in the Civil Wars
and the destruction of the Crown, and though the last struggle against
the Stuarts and the greater general war against Louis XIV. were but
sequels to the vast affair, yet the great consequence of that affair
was fixed before these wars began. The first third of the seventeenth
century launches a new epoch. From about that time there go forward
upon parallel lines the great spiritual and consequent temporal
processes of modern Europe. They have yet to come to judgment, for they
are not yet fulfilled: but perhaps their judgment is near.
These processes filling the last three hundred years have been as
follows: (1) A rapid extension of physical science and with it of every
other form of acquaintance with demonstrable and measurable things. (2)
The rise, chiefly in the new Protestant part of Europe (but spreading
thence in part to the Catholic) of what we call today “Capitalism,”
that is, the possession of the means of production by the few, and
their exploitation of the many. (3) The corruption of the principle of
authority until it was confused with mere force. (4) The general,
though not universal, growth of total wealth with the growth of
physical knowledge. (5) The ever widening effect of skepticism, which,
whether masked under traditional forms or no, was from the beginning a
spirit of _complete_ negation and led at last to the questioning not
only of any human institutions, but of the very forms of thought and of
the mathematical truths. (6) With all these of course we have had a
universal mark—the progressive extension of despair.