SOCIAL STATE OF ENGLAND.
Οἶσθ᾽ οὖν ὅτι καὶ ἀνθρώπων εἴδη τοσαῦτα ἀνάγκη τρόπων εἶναι,
ὅσαπερ καὶ πολιτειῶν; ἢ οἴει ἐκ δρυός ποθεν ἢ ἐκ πέτρας τὰς
πολιτείας γίγνεσθαι, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχὶ ἐκ τῶν ἠθῶν τῶν ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν, ἃ
ἂν ὥσπερ ῥέψαντα τἆλλα ἐφελκύσηται.
You are doubtless aware that the varieties of human character
must involve a corresponding number of constitutions. Or do you
think that the constitutions we see are foundlings from the
woods and rocks, and not the legitimate offspring of the moral
dispositions of the members of each State which, so to speak,
turn the scale, carrying the whole balance with them?--PLATO,
REP., vii. 2.
The population of England, now over three and twenty millions, and
increasing two more every decade, numbered, in the middle of the
seventeenth century, but about five and a half millions. Commerce was
too insufficiently extended, too little of the soil had been brought
under cultivation, too little science introduced into the processes
of manufacture and agriculture, for the country to provide food or
employment for a large number of inhabitants.
The largest and most important trading towns were in the southern half
of the kingdom. London contained about 500,000 inhabitants, a sixth of
its present population. The population of Bristol, the next place to
London in size, was not 30,000, The large manufacturing towns in the
north were just beginning to rise into importance. Sheffield, where
knives were made, contained between 2000 and 3000 inhabitants; Leeds, a
great seat of the woollen manufacture, between 3000 and 4000; 5000 or
6000 formed the population of Manchester, where cotton, imported from
Cyprus and Smyrna, had been manufactured for the last thirty or forty
years.
%MONOPOLIES.%
It is now acknowledged that the result of granting to persons or
classes special privileges for the conduct of any trade or manufacture
can only be to destroy competition and so raise prices to the injury of
the consumers, for the supposed or real advantage of a few. Nor is this
the whole of the evil. Wages can only come out of capital, and when
capital lies idle and is checked in its natural growth by a narrowing
of the market and an artificial enhancement of price, then wages are
checked as well.
♦Trade and commerce.♦ In the seventeenth century, however, these
principles were not understood, and trade was shackled by restrictions,
imposed sometimes by the Executive, sometimes by the Legislature.
The monopolies granted by Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. were
especially injurious, because the owners of each patent were so few,
that they were enabled, by combining together, to force upon the
consumer a bad article, and at the same time to raise its price and tax
the public for their own benefit. Though the granting of monopolies
was forbidden by statute law in James’ last Parliament (1623), the
practice was continued until the Scotch war, when Charles recalled all
patents, in the hope of regaining some of the popularity he had lost.
Though, in this case, the evils of interference were very clearly felt
and seen, yet there was no perception of the principle that trade
flourishes most when left alone; and the interference of Parliament
was often invoked to protect both producers and traders against their
own countrymen and against foreigners. For instance, indigo was
brought from the Indies to Europe, and was soon largely employed in
the place of woad for dyeing cloth, as the dye was richer, and the
process cheaper; but when farmers, merchants, and carriers, engaged in
the woad trade, found their employment decreasing, they raised a loud
outcry against the new dye, saying that it injured the material of the
cloth: on this the governments in England, Germany, and France forbade
the use of indigo, branding it with the name of the ‘Devil’s dye.’ An
act, passed in England to this effect, under Elizabeth, remained in
force until the reign of Charles II., so that the price of cloth was
artificially raised, for nearly a century, through the interference of
the government.
%MERCANTILE SYSTEM.%
Nations, like individuals, gain by being allowed to interchange their
goods freely. Each can then expend its labour and capital upon those
branches of industry for which it possesses special advantages, while
it has its own wants supplied at the least possible cost, by taking
from other nations those products which they can supply more cheaply
than itself. For these imports the nation pays by exporting, in
exchange, the superfluity of its own special products. Legislators of
the seventeenth century believed, however in the mercantile system,
which assumed that money was wealth, and that the more money a country
contained, the more prosperous it would be. Money, however, is, of
course, only one form of wealth, although the medium of exchange for
all other wealth. If the amount of coin in a country was doubled, and
none of it allowed to quit the country, its true wealth, its corn,
stock, its mineral produce, and the like, would not be doubled also. A
rise of prices would result. Where one shilling had been paid before,
two shillings would now have to be paid. Everybody’s pocket would be
heavier, but nobody would be any the richer. Governments, however, from
a belief in the mercantile system, tried to prevent the importation
of goods, in order to stop money from going out of the country, and
encouraged their exportation, in order to bring money into the country;
and the more exports and fewer imports of a people, the more prosperous
they were supposed to be. Hence it followed that nations were jealous
of one another’s trade, and it was thought a happy thing for England,
that while she was at peace, the Continent was devastated by war,
because she was likely to find fewer rivals to compete with in foreign
markets. Heavy duties were laid on articles of importation, in order
that the country, instead of buying them of foreigners, might, if
possible, produce them at home. Such duties could only be pernicious.
They compelled consumers to pay high prices; they did not provide
extra employment for Englishmen, because the same amount of labour and
capital, given to industries more suited to the climate, the soil, or
the character of the people, would have served to buy the protected
articles from foreigners, and left a surplus over, to be employed upon
further production.
%TRADING COMPANIES--EAST INDIES.%
♦Foreign trade in hands of companies.♦ During the sixteenth century,
merchants trading to foreign parts had generally obtained charters from
the crown, incorporating them into companies with special privileges.
Thus the trade with Russia was monopolized by a ‘Russian Company,’
incorporated in 1554; that with the Low Countries and Germany by the
‘Merchant Adventurers,’ who were incorporated as early as 1407. One
company traded with Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; while the ‘Turkey
Company’ engrossed the trade with the Levant. The fact that the members
of these companies were generally Londoners, helps to explain the great
size and wealth of the capital compared with other ports. In the year
1604, the sum received in the port of London for customs and imposts
amounted to £110,000, while that collected from the same sources in
all the rest of the kingdom only to £17,000. At the accession of James
I., the French trade alone was open to merchants not members of the
companies. This monopoly of the foreign trade excited great discontent
among the excluded, and, in 1604, a bill to throw open foreign commerce
passed the Commons, but was rejected by the Lords. An act, however,
was passed in 1606, granting liberty of trade with France, Spain, and
Portugal; and the Turkey Company was formed on a new footing, so that
all who paid a certain subscription were allowed to become members.
Commerce grew, and the long peace that lasted from the beginning of
the century until the breaking out of the civil war, was so favourable
to its extension, that, if the accounts of writers of the time may be
believed, the progress of the present century has hardly been in a
greater ratio than that which prevailed in all but the war decade.[154]
%JEALOUSY OF DUTCH.%
In the year 1600, three years before James’ accession, the first
charter was granted to an East India Company, ‘freely and solely to
trade into countries and parts of Asia, Africa, and America, beyond
the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan.’ Without the licence
of this company, no merchant might trade in all this sea, upon pain of
forfeiting ships and cargoes. The first trading stations or factories
on the coasts of India, and in the West India islands, had been
established by the Portuguese. Jealous of the appearance of strangers,
the Portuguese starved and imprisoned Englishmen unfortunate enough to
fall into their power, and, by blocking up the river mouths, prevented
English vessels from approaching the trading town of Surat, which
was then the emporium of the western coast of India (1606). English
captains, however, by defeating the Portuguese with a smaller number of
ships, greatly impressed the natives with an idea of English courage
and seamanship. The enterprise of English merchants soon made its
way inland to Agra, then the seat of government of the Great Mogul,
and obtained from him a charter, granting their countrymen liberty
to trade. English trading stations were established in Sumatra and
Java, and at last, in spite of the opposition of the Portuguese, an
English factory was founded at Surat (1612). In 1616, there were nine
factories in India alone, one in Japan, besides many in Celebes,
Borneo, and other of the East India islands. About the same time as the
English, the Dutch also opened a trade with the East. The Portuguese
had made themselves so detested through their cruelties, that the
natives willingly joined with the newcomers in driving them from their
stations. But by the time that they had quitted the field, commercial
jealousy arose between the English and the Dutch.
♦Commercial prosperity of Holland.♦ The seven united provinces of
Holland, ever since they had won their independence of Spain, had
prospered to such an extent, that the number and activity of their
inhabitants was the marvel of every traveller. The English merchant
service could not cope in number with the vessels the Dutch sent
annually to France, Spain, Norway, Russia, Germany, and the East.
The herring fisheries off the English coasts were mostly carried on
by Dutch fishing-boats, called busses. The most valuable export of
England was wool in the raw or manufactured state; but the Dutch were
so much the better workmen, that they imported large quantities of wool
from England, and having worked it up into cloth, made their money
by selling it again to foreigners, including the English themselves.
They possessed further a large carrying trade; for, having the true
instinct for business, and being content with a low rate of interest,
when combined with security of payment and quickness of returns, they
became the carriers of Europe, buying the produce of one country and
selling it to another, requiring such a small profit in addition to the
original cost of the goods, that merchants of other nations did not
care to compete with them.[155]
%DUTCH IN EAST INDIES.%
As the English showed a more enterprising spirit, and an intention of
extending their trade, they awoke the jealousy of their neighbours
in Holland. The seamen of the two nations had already come into
unfriendly contact off the coast of Spitzbergen, where whale fisheries
were carried on. The English, the Dutch, and the Danes, each making a
preposterous claim to the dominion of this island and the surrounding
waters, used to demand toll of all foreign vessels in return for
licence to fish. It was rare, however, for the demand to be enforced,
as the merchants of each nation took the precaution of sending out a
fleet sufficiently strong to resist the claims of all opponents. In
the East Indies, the Dutch, relying on James’ well-known dislike to
war, made outrageous aggressions on English merchants and traders.
They drove the English out of the Molucca islands, and would have
massacred them in Japan but for the interference of the natives (1619).
At Amboyna, one of the Moluccas, they murdered ten Englishmen on a
groundless charge of conspiracy (1623). From this time, though the two
countries continued nominally at peace, constant fighting took place
upon these Eastern waters between the sailors of the Dutch and English
East India Companies. Little law prevailed at sea, and a merchant
vessel, if a safe opportunity occurred, felt no shame in taking up the
calling of a pirate. The English were finally driven from several of
their settlements, and the affairs of the East India Company languished
in consequence.
♦Imports.♦ The principal imports from the East were silk, indigo, and
spices. From Turkey, besides gems, came silk, cotton, and yarn. Coffee
was first brought to England by a merchant belonging to the Turkey
Company, who set up a coffee-house in Cornhill (1652). From that time
coffee-houses multiplied in London, and became favourite places of
resort. Tea, though commonly drunk by Europeans in Surat, was not
imported to England in any quantity before the end of the century.
♦Exports.♦ The principal exports which England exchanged for her
imports were her wool and cloth, with tin and lead.
%AMERICA COLONIZED.%
♦Colonization of North American coast.♦ In 1606 James I. had
incorporated by charter two companies for the colonization of America.
The one called the South Virginian Company, or London Adventurers, was
authorized to colonize the territory which now forms the States of
Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia; the second, or Plymouth Company, the
territory which forms the modern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York,
and New England States. Neither company was to form any settlement
within a hundred miles of land previously colonized by the other.
The first, or London Adventurers, indeed, set to work at once, and
colonized Virginia (1607). Maryland, however, was not colonized by
them, but through the exertions of Lord Baltimore, who obtained from
Charles I. a charter, granting him the country to hold of the crown
for himself and his heirs (1634). The Plymouth Company was simply
obstructive. The earliest colonists in New England were the Pilgrim
Fathers, a body of persecuted sectarians. Having obtained leave from
the London Adventurers, on hard terms, to settle in Virginia, they were
carried by a treacherous captain in the bleak months of winter to the
coast of Massachusetts, where, fighting hard with cold, hunger, and
disease, they founded Plymouth (1620). But though their endurance had
conquered nature, it had still to struggle with the ‘laws in defence
of trade.’ The fact that the original Plymouth Company had never
succeeded in founding a single colony did not impair its exclusive
rights; and, without the consent of that company, “not a ship might
sail into a harbour from Newfoundland to the latitude of Philadelphia;
not a skin might be purchased in the interior; not a fish caught on the
coast; not an emigrant tread the soil.”[156] In 1624, the company was
fiercely assailed in the House of Commons. “Your patent,” said Coke, to
one of its members, “is a monopoly; and the ends of private gain are
concealed under colour of planting a colony.... Shall none visit the
sea-coast for fishing? This is to make a monopoly upon the seas, which
wont to be free. If you alone are to pack and dry fish, you attempt a
monopoly of wind and sun.” On the coast of Maine private adventurers
were soon emboldened to plant fishing stations, which gradually
ripened into colonies. The company, however, so far maintained its
exclusive privileges, that it used to sell patents to individuals and
companies, authorizing them to colonize vast tracts of country. Thus
Charlestown was founded in 1628. A company bought Massachusetts and
founded Salem (1629). Connecticut was colonized from Massachusetts
(1636). By the middle of the century, the whole line of coast reaching
from Newfoundland to Florida, and many of the West India islands, were
studded with settlements. The principal imports from these colonies
were tobacco, grain, and fish.
%EXTRAVAGANCE IN DRESS.%
The influx of wealth from these extensions of trade was enormous; but
though wealth, where it falls on worthy shoulders, brings refinement,
in many it breeds mere luxury and ostentation. There was immense
extravagance in dress and style of living; this was especially
displayed in London, before the ascendancy of the Presbyterians.
Ladies, while they followed the fashions in wearing paint and patches
upon their faces, vied with one another in the amount of gold they
could show broidered on their silks and satins. Gentlemen would
‘Wear a farm in shoe-strings edged with gold,
And spangled garters worth a copyhold;
A hose and doublet which a lordship cost;
A gaudy cloak, three manors’ price almost;
A beaver band and feather for the head,
Prized at the Church’s tithe--the poor man’s bread.’[157]
The costume was picturesque enough. A broad-brimmed beaver hat, adorned
with feathers; the long and curling hair shown off by a lace collar; a
doublet of silk or satin, with slashed sleeves; a short cloak hanging
over one shoulder; breeches reaching to the knee, and finished off with
ribands; silk stockings and shoes adorned with rosettes; a sword-belt,
with weapon attached; and the whole set off with jewels and gold lace.
%ART AND KNOWLEDGE.%
♦Upper classes cultivated.♦ In many the leisure which wealth gave was
well employed. Intellectual activity, a love of music and of art, a
spirit of enterprise and research, distinguished the upper and educated
classes of society. Sir John Eliot’s previous studies enabled him to
employ his years of captivity in writing a philosophical treatise. At
that ‘college situated in purer air,’ as Hyde called Lord Falkland’s
house near Oxford, men, who afterwards took different sides in the war,
used to meet and discuss their different opinions, whether scientific
or social, political or religious, with the happy freedom of friendly
intercourse. Sir Robert Cotton formed an antiquarian and historical
library, whence the popular leaders drew stores of precedents on which
to base their defence of their country’s liberties, in their struggle
with the prerogative. On a trivial excuse, Sir Robert was imprisoned
by order of the Council, and his library put under lock and key.
“I went several times to visit and comfort him,” wrote one of his
friends in the year 1630. “He would tell me they had broken his heart
that had locked up his library from him.” He remained in prison for
several months, and died in the spring of the following year (1631).
Though men such as Falkland, Eliot, and Cotton were the élite of their
class, they were also its representatives. Noblemen and gentlemen
commonly made collections of pictures, antiquities, ancient armour,
bronzes, and medals; and took interest in scientific discoveries. The
barometer, the microscope, the telescope, were all instruments newly
invented. Glamorgan, Charles’ agent in Ireland, was renowned for his
mechanical skill. In love of art, Charles was at one with some of the
first of his enemies. He made a fine collection of pictures, medals,
and curiosities of all kinds, and treated English and foreign artists
liberally. Rubens, who was sent to Charles as the Spanish king’s envoy,
painted for him the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall,
built by Inigo Jones for James I. Vandyke passed the best years of
his life in England; and though Charles’ weakness may be read in eyes
and mouth on his canvas, yet the painter has done much to foster the
ideal conception of the cavalier-king. Walker, an English painter, has
left several portraits of Cromwell. But love of knowledge, of art, of
antiquities, would never have created the greatness which shone out
in the English character during the great rebellion. The enterprise
and patriotism of the Elizabethan age remained unimpaired, and was
spiritualized by religion. Except the courtiers, all classes, lettered
and unlettered, seemed inspired by fulness of belief and earnestness
of purpose. Men were unselfish and faithful, ready to risk fortune and
life in their cause. Hence the first New England colonies struggled
into existence through a terrible ordeal of cold and want. Hence the
appearance of men with the heroic qualities of Eliot, Hampden, Pym,
Vane, and Cromwell, rising up one after another, to lead the way in
defence of liberty. Hence the devotion with which the perilous cause of
the Parliament was embraced by thousands, while the result of the war
was yet doubtful; and the unquenched hope with which Cavaliers met the
ruin of themselves and their families, clinging to the cause of their
master after all was lost.
%THE STAGE AND COURT.%
Puritan tradesmen and yeomen had played a leading part in accomplishing
the overthrow of the government of Church and State. These denounced
the pursuit of pleasure as vanity, if not actual sin. Discarding
jewels, lace, silks, and satins, they dressed themselves in plain
black suits, long black cloaks, and high steeple-crowned hats. Many
went so far as to exclaim against music, art, and profane learning, as
temptations of the devil, that divert the thoughts from God. Yet their
fanaticism, however exaggerated, had its apology in the exaggeration
of the opposite principles, as well as in the grandeur of the religious
movement from which their feelings sprang. The character of the stage
had been deteriorating ever since the death of Elizabeth. The plays of
Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger, were far coarser in language and
spirit than those of the earlier dramatists, and, from their low moral
tone and the character of their plots, were but too often calculated
to make the theatre a school of vice. The courtiers of James I. and
Charles I., amongst the most constant of play-goers, were not only
absurdly extravagant in their dress, but often outrageously profligate
in their lives. The latest historian of English literature observes
how at this period of the stage, ‘the noble chivalric paganism’ of the
sixteenth century had degenerated into ‘a base and coarse sensuality.’
Elizabeth’s old courtiers, though by no means straitlaced, were
astounded at the licence of James’ court, Sir John Harrington thus
describes an entertainment given by James in honour of the King of
Denmark. “The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll
about in intoxication.... The lady who did play the queen’s part (in
the masque of the Queen of Sheba) did carry most precious gifts to
both their majesties; but, forgetting the steps arising to the canopy,
overset her caskets into his Danish Majesty’s lap and fell at his
feet, though I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry
and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand to make all clean. His
Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he
fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner
chamber and laid on a bed of state, which was not a little defiled with
the presents of the Queen, which had been bestowed on his garments;
such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good
matters.... Now did appear in rich dress Hope, Faith, and Charity;
Hope did essay to speak, but wine rendered her endeavours so feeble
that she withdrew and hoped the king would excuse her brevity; Faith
left the court in a staggering condition. Next came Victory, who after
much lamentable utterance, was led away like a silly captive, and laid
to sleep on the outer steps of the ante-chamber. As for Peace, she
most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of
those who did oppose her coming. I ne’er did see such lack of good
order, discretion, and sobriety in our queen’s days.”[158]
♦Immorality amongst upper classes generated fanatics amongst lower.♦
Though Charles himself was not addicted to the coarser vices, and
required the forms of propriety to be observed in his court, he had
no such hatred of vice as to cause him to select his friends or
companions from amongst men of pure lives, Neither Buckingham, the
king’s favourite, nor Lord Jermyn, the queen’s favourite, made the
least pretence to purity of morals.[159] The example of courtiers had
its weight in influencing the conduct of the classes beneath them.
Gentlemen from the country came up to London and ruined themselves
in trying to keep pace with a fashionable life. Idlers of all ranks
spent their days drinking, smoking, and gambling in taverns. When
such was the order of the day amongst the pleasure-seeking classes of
society, it was no matter of wonder that, by a revulsion of feeling,
the more earnest amongst the uneducated should seek refuge from vice in
austerity of life, and that amusements, constantly abused, should come
to be regarded as wicked and demoralizing in themselves. It was a noble
disgust at whatever was really lowering to human nature, that led the
Puritans into the error of trying to suppress vice by discountenancing
games and sports that had delighted many generations of Englishmen.
Thus it was that theatrical exhibitions of all kinds were put down by
ordinance of Parliament; spectators were ordered to be fined; actors
to be whipped at the cart’s tail. The dance round the maypole, the
wrestling match on the village green, were proscribed. Christmas-day,
kept from time immemorial as a feast, was turned into a solemn fast.
Music and art had been taken into the service both of Laud’s Church and
of levity; they were therefore regarded as accessories to the spread
of Popish superstitions and laxity of life, and against them a like
war was waged. Paintings and sculptures were removed from churches,
and organs were forbidden. Though, in many cases, the ravages done by
time, war, spoliation, and neglect have been unfairly put down to the
Puritans, yet in others there is little doubt that works of art which
had been spared for their beauty and antiquity at the Reformation,
were now wantonly defaced and destroyed by the ignorant and fanatical
soldiers who fought in the armies of the Commonwealth, It would be
unfair, however, to class all Puritans together as holding upon these
points the same opinions. Like other great religious movements,
Puritanism, beginning with the people, spread upwards, and in its
course became subject to the influences of education and class feeling.
Hence there were numbers of Puritan gentlemen, whose minds knowledge
had rendered too liberal, or in whom the pride of birth was too strong
to allow them to adopt the habits, language, and ideas of their more
ignorant and fanatical companions. Rembrandt’s etching of the Dutch
Anabaptist minister shows a face by no means wanting in intelligence,
refinement, and capacity for enjoyment of life. Mrs. Hutchinson’s
description of her husband, an Anabaptist officer, presents us with a
picture of the Puritan English gentleman, as he appeared at the time
when Puritanism was most in repute:--“He could dance admirably well,
but neither in youth nor riper years made any practice of it; he had
skill in fencing, such as became a gentleman; he had a great love of
music, and often diverted himself with a viol, on which he played
masterly; he shot excellently in bows and guns, and much used them for
his exercise; he had great judgment in paintings, gravings, sculpture,
and all liberal arts, and had many curiosities of value in all kinds;
he took much pleasure in planting groves and walks and fruit-trees;
he left off very early the wearing of anything that was costly, yet
in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a gentleman: upon
occasions, though never without just ones, he would be very angry, yet
he was never outrageous in passion. He hated persecution for religion,
and detested all scoffs at any practice of worship, though such a one
as he was not persuaded of it. Wherever he saw wisdom, learning, or
other virtues in men, he honoured them highly. His conversation was
very pleasant, for he was naturally cheerful. Scurrilous discourse
even among men he abhorred. His whole life was the rule of temperance
in meat, drink, apparel, pleasure.” Milton, the poet of the Puritans,
was a Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Italian scholar. Fairfax and
Cromwell both gave manuscripts and books to the newly-founded Bodleian
Library at Oxford. The Presbyterians, indeed, during their ascendancy,
passed an order in Parliament, that all superstitious pictures in the
king’s collections should be burnt, the remainder sold. For the sale
the Parliament has received more censure than it perhaps deserves.
Charles himself would no doubt have denied that his valuable collection
was in any sense the nation’s property; but, in the year 1643, when the
exigencies of the war were very great, it was hardly to be expected
that the Parliament should hesitate to confiscate and sell the king’s
movables, more than those of any minor delinquent. It is said that
Cromwell, on becoming Protector, tried to keep the remainder of the
collection together, and put a stop to the sales.[160] Nor was this the
only point in which his largeness of mind made him tread in opposite
footsteps to the Presbyterians. Though unable to obtain the repeal of
persecuting laws, yet when the executive came to lie in his own hand
he often suffered them to be broken with impunity. Himself a lover of
music, he placed an organ in the palace at Hampton Court, where he
often retired for Sunday. Plays, written by Sir William Davenant, were
performed at the cockpit in Drury Lane (1658), while strolling players
again acted at country places, and in the houses of the nobility.[161]
%WANT OF HUMANITY.%
Much of the savage violence of the middle ages still remained in the
midst of the increased refinements of life that wealth and knowledge
were bringing in their train. The custom of society did not require
that the smallest effort should be made to control passion. Every
gentleman wore his sword by his side, and was ready to draw it on
provocation, and it was no uncommon occurrence for a man to be wounded
in the presence of ladies in consequence of some drunken brawl.
Amusements were cruel; bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and cock-fighting
delighted all classes in town and country, till they were suppressed by
Cromwell. The greatest subsequent advance of morality and refinement
has been in this question of cruelty. There was then a general
callousness to the sight of pain. The humanity of those who have
signalized our own age by carrying laws to check the ill-treatment
of animals, would then have had first to check the brutalizing
punishments which the law itself inflicted on men. The sight of human
beings in torment failed to awaken feelings of indignation or of pain
sufficiently strong to cause a reform of the criminal law. Women
who had murdered their husbands were burned alive in Smithfield. Men
were yearly hung by hundreds for paltry thefts. Prisoners were so
neglected that they often died of disease and starvation before the
time of their trial came on. Town and county gaols were miserable and
filthy dens unfit for the habitation of man or beast. In the following
century, Howard thus describes the gaol for the county of Cornwall at
Launceston: “The prison is a room or passage 23½ feet by 7½ feet, with
only one window 2 feet by 1½; and three dungeons or cages on the side
opposite the window; these are about 6½ feet deep, one 9 feet long,
one about 8 feet, one not five feet; the last for women. They are all
very offensive; no chimney, no water, no sewers, damp earth floors,
no infirmary. The court not secure, and prisoners seldom permitted to
go out into it. Indeed, the whole prison is out of repair, and yet
the gaoler lives distant. I once found the prisoners chained two or
three together. Their provisions were put down to them through a hole
(9 inches by 8) in the floor of the room above, and those who served
them often caught the fatal fever. I found the keeper, his assistant,
and one prisoner all sick of it, and heard that a few years before
many prisoners had died of it, and the keeper and his wife in one
night.” Though dungeons and fetters were, as a rule, reserved for
felons, debtors were in some respects worse off than the highwayman,
the housebreaker, and the murderer. To these last it was usual to allow
a pennyworth or two-pennyworth of bread a day, but debtors and other
offenders guilty of no criminal, often of no moral, offence were left
to provide entirely for their own sustenance. In the London prisons a
wealthy man, such as Sir John Eliot, by paying high fees could provide
himself with the luxury of a bed and a separate room, but the ordinary
prisoner slept on the floor in the common apartment, thankful if he
could obtain of his keeper a little straw at a reasonable rate. As a
rule, keepers and gaolers received no salaries, but made fortunes on
the fees they extorted from prisoners. Men might be confined in prison
for months, and then acquitted at the assizes, and, after acquittal,
were still liable to be dragged back again and locked up because unable
or unwilling to pay the exorbitant fees demanded. It was not seldom
that the sufferings of the prison inmates were avenged in a fearful
way. “The most pernicious infection,” says Bacon, “next the plague,
is the smell of the gaol where the prisoners have been long and close
and nastily kept, whereof we have had in our time the experience twice
or thrice, when both the judges that sat upon the gaol and numbers of
those who attended the business, sickened upon it and died.” Between
the years 1573 and 1579, 100 prisoners died in the King’s Bench of ‘a
certain contagion called the sickness of the house.’ Without knowledge
of what the prison was, it is not possible fully to appreciate the
cruelty of the sentences of the Star Chamber, nor yet the heroism of
those who accepted an imprisonment of indefinite length, rather than
pay an illegal fine. When this Court ordered Lilburne to be ‘laid
alone, with irons on his hands and legs, in the wards of the Fleet,
where the meanest sort of the prisoners are put,’ and forbade any to
resort to him or give him money, the sentence was nothing short of a
lingering death by disease and starvation. If it had been literally
carried out for many months, the prisoner must have died.[162]
%SUPERSTITIONS.%
Credulity and ignorance walking, as they do, hand in hand, added to the
cruelty of the age. Knowledge had not spread far enough to free the
minds of men of a load of superstitious beliefs, handed down to them
by their forefathers. The cavalier, afraid of no enemy in the field,
would forebode evil to himself when a hare crossed his path, or the
salt was overset. The clergyman of every parish was ready to exorcise
the possessed. Ladies hung round the necks of the sick a charm, such
as ‘a spider in a nutshell lapped in silk,’ with full belief in its
efficacy to effect a cure. A belief in such amulets inspired hope, and
probably saved many from falling by the hands of the country doctors
of the time. An eclipse of the sun was so dreaded that hardly any
would work or turn out of their doors for the day. During the war,
astrologers on both sides published almanacs, foretelling events.
King James prided himself on his learning in this subject, and had
an old woman tortured and put to death in Scotland, for raising a
storm as he came from Denmark. He afterwards wrote a book on purpose
to support the common belief in witchcraft; and in the second year
of his reign a law was passed, making it felony to consult or employ
any evil spirit. On one occasion at the Lancashire assizes nineteen
witches were arraigned, and ten executed. The history of the witchcraft
laws is the strongest homily on the necessity of diffusing such an
education as will stimulate the intellect to independent thought. The
vagaries of independent thought may be corrected by the conflict of
minds, but bigotry with its narrow zeal cramps the development of all,
while it deals murder or terror broadcast. Any withered decrepit old
woman was liable to be at once feared and abused by her neighbours as
a witch. Perhaps in her irritation she might curse “sometimes one,
sometimes another, and that from the master of the house, his wife and
children, to the little pig that lyeth in the sty;” then, did a sick
cow die, she had bewitched it; did a child languish, she was causing
its death, for she had been seen by one of her neighbours with a clay
or waxen image of the child in her hands. Such proofs of witchcraft
were quite sufficient to convince a jury that the accused was guilty.
Men conceived that because an object was disagreeable and revolting to
the eye, it must therefore have a sinister influence on their fortunes,
just as conversely the beautiful wise women of the Norsemen were held
to have a beneficial power. It was the common fallacy of inferring
facts from feelings--of judging that there was necessarily some reality
in nature corresponding to a feeling in the mind. Special delusions
arise, when men shut themselves up in some little world of their own,
and the conceptions of the Puritans made them peculiarly liable to this
error. During their ascendancy, hundreds suffered death for witchcraft,
for just as they believed in special providences for good, that is in
God’s continual interference with the ordinary course of the world
for the support of His servants, so they believed in the immediate
interposition of Satan with horn and hoof, and would as soon have
denied the power of one man to make an agreement with another, as that
of man or woman to form a compact with the devil. A common ordeal was
to prick the witch with pins and needles, to find out if the devil had
rendered any spot insensible: another was to throw her into a pond, and
if she did not sink, it was held a clear proof that she was rejected
by the baptismal element. In one year of the Presbyterian domination
fourteen witches were found in a village of fourteen families, and
twenty more were selected for burning in a place near.[163] About
the same time, a man, by name Hopkins, travelled through the eastern
counties in the character of a witch-finder, and caused sixty persons
to be hung in Suffolk alone. His career at last was stopped short by
some magistrate, who, wiser than his fellows, set the villain himself
to the swimming ordeal. The belief in witchcraft was universal in
Europe at the time. If a judge had no belief in witchcraft, he was
obliged to conceal his opinion on the Bench, as otherwise the jury
would have set him down as a man of no religion, and declared the
accused guilty forthwith.[164]
%THE NOBLEMAN.%
Though the social system of the country showed a painful contrast
between boundless wealth and hopeless poverty, and though the laws of
debt and of trade caused a needless amount of misery, yet as compared
with previous times, the barriers of privilege were not so unrelaxing,
the lines between classes were not so hardly drawn. The Procrustean
arrangement of the feudal system had long been gradually modified. The
revolutionary spirit now tried to eliminate it from the law. The gentry
were, in fact, eager themselves to change an honourable but irksome
tenure into one that they had once looked upon as inferior, but the
freedom of which they had now long coveted. The Long Parliament passed
a resolution for the removal of feudal tenure (24th Feb.). Cromwell,
when Protector, passed an Act of Parliament to the same effect. After
the restoration, Cromwell’s acts were held invalid, but Charles II.
gave his consent to a similar act, converting feudal tenure into common
socage. The king was then, indeed, not merely a nominal landlord.
Feudal tenants had to pay him fines before entering upon their estates.
If the heirs were minors he appropriated their rents until they came of
age. A female ward was required to marry any person of suitable rank,
proposed by the sovereign, under penalty of paying a heavy fine; in
fact this was one of the perquisites of favourites. Fines were exacted
when the sovereign’s eldest son was knighted or his eldest daughter
married.
The chief sources of the wealth of the nobles and richer gentry were
the rents received from their tenantry and the wool of their sheep,
which browsed by thousands on heaths and pasture lands. Their houses
were large and commodious. Stag heads, muskets, swords, and coats
of armour decorated the sides of their halls. The walls of their
sitting-rooms were often painted with figures, hunting landscapes, or
curious designs; tables, chairs, and cabinets, were richly carved.
In the dining-room, the substitution of forks for fingers in eating
was a notable advance in refinement. There were displays of plate for
ornament, as well as for use. The households of some of the chief
nobility consisted of as many as two hundred persons. At the Duke of
Beaufort’s house at Badminton, soap, candles, beer, and beds were
all home-made. Outside their mansions the owners formed terraces,
bowling-alleys, and tennis-courts, planted groves of elms, oaks, and
walnuts, and enclosed large parks, which they stocked with deer.
They laid out gardens adorned with statues, fountains, and aviaries,
and cultivated what were then rare flowers and fruits--lilies,
roses, cherries, pomegranates, and grapes. The eldest son inherited
his father’s dignities and estates. The younger passed into other
employments, became barristers or merchants, held office at court,
or sought their fortunes in foreign service. The girls were educated
at home, and learnt, besides their letters, music, dancing, and
painting.[165]
%THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN.%
The ordinary country gentleman held land by knights’ service of some
superior lord, or of the crown. He lived the life of a farmer, looking
after his corn and pigs and sheep. He seldom left his county, and
a journey to London would be a leading event in his life. Besides
cock-fighting and bull-baiting, hunting was his chief amusement. His
table was plentifully supplied, and he was generally hospitable to his
poorer neighbours. Sheep and cattle could not be fattened, as clover
and turnips were not grown until the beginning of the next century, so
that in winter time his fare consisted mainly of salted meat, fish,
wild fowl, and rabbits. If he was justice of the peace, he had half the
business of the parish upon his hands; to see that the peace was kept;
to set children found growing up idle to work; to receive the accounts
of the overseers of paupers; to punish rogues and vagabonds. But as
in the army and the Parliament, so in the country parish, new men
had risen into importance; and now, perhaps, some yeoman or Roundhead
tradesman, a buyer of bishops’ lands, was justice of the peace, in
place of the Royalist knight or squire, who, having fought for King
Charles, had been obliged to compound for his estate, and returned to
his home to find himself a comparatively poor and uninfluential man.
This was felt bitterly, for the Cavaliers who swelled Charles’ armies,
though not refined over their cups or in their amusements, were as
proud of their descent as the greatest noble in the land. The children
learnt their letters at home, or at the village school, some “little
house by the churchyard side.” The eldest son inherited his father’s
land; the younger became merchants, lawyers, sailors, and clergymen.
The daughters, though getting a share of what education there was, for
all that, often could barely read and write, but were brought up to be
good housewives, to manage a dairy, to bake, to brew, to distil water
from flowers and plants.
%THE YEOMAN.%
Small farmers, or freeholders, were numerous and independent. It
was common for yeomen holding land by free socage[166] tenure to
possess £40 or £50 a year. Of these petty proprietors, who farmed
their few acres with their own hands, there were reported to be
180,000, a large proportion out of a population of 5,500,000. Their
sons became tradesmen and lawyers, or entered the church. Sometimes
very distinguished men rose out of their ranks. Thus the father of
Selden, the lawyer and great Hebrew scholar, is said to have been a
yeoman worth about £40 a year. The sectarian army, which conquered
the Cavaliers, was mainly recruited from freeholders and their sons.
Small farmers, proprietors of the soil, who once played this important
part in English history, can no longer be said to exist as a class,
large farms and hired labour having taken their place in the economy
of the country.
♦Decrease in numbers of small farmers.♦ For more than a century
preceding the time of the civil war, their numbers had been slowly
decreasing. The demand for English wool in foreign parts was constantly
rising, so that to keep sheep became a more profitable occupation than
to grow corn. To convert arable into pasture land, landed proprietors
would sometimes employ fraud, menace, or actual violence, in order to
dispossess the small farmers of their Naboth’s vineyards. Whether these
small farmers were tenants holding land for life or a stated number
of years, or were copyholders, or even freeholders, it was no easy
matter for the owner of a few acres to withstand the ‘little tyrant of
the fields,’ who might possibly be justice of the peace, or even lord
lieutenant of his county.
The following is an instance of landlord oppression in the reign of
Charles I.:--Sir Edward Bullock, wishing to enclose land in Norfolk,
informed his tenant, Blackhall, that unless he would consent to sell
his lands and yield up his leases, he should be made to ‘run the
country.’ Blackhall, in consequence of his refusal to part with his
property, found his hedges broken down, his gates opened, and himself
sued at law for trespass, because his cattle had strayed out upon
the common. The verdict was given against Sir Edward, who vowed to
be revenged upon Blackhall’s witnesses. He caused the house of one
to be pulled down, so that the owner’s wife and children passed two
nights in the streets, for nobody dared take them in; and they “being
afterwards by a justice’s direction received into a house, Sir Edward
so threatened the owner, that he turned them out of doors, and all
the winter they lay in an outhouse, without fire, so that the witness
himself, his wife, and one child died.” He caused a second witness, a
woman, to be so beaten, that she could not put on her clothes for a
month afterwards. The Star Chamber fined Sir Edward £1000 damages to
the king, and £100 damages to Blackhall, ‘out of which something was to
be given to the children of the man whose house was pulled down.’[167]
After such a tale of wrong, it is cheering to find that substantial
justice was done, even by the Star Chamber, though it may be said that
now the offences would receive a much severer punishment than a fine,
and that the records of the court show it was only too glad to fine
any rich man, as a means of recouping the exchequer, when the king had
dispensed with Parliaments.
%THE LABOURER.%
Although villeinage had long died out in England, and had been
suppressed even in the western counties before the latter part of
Elizabeth’s reign (1574), the condition of the hired labourer was such,
that, from a modern point of view, he could not fairly be called a
free man. His employers, the landowners, passed laws which kept him
in a state of half-bondage to themselves. His wages were fixed by the
justices of the peace, according to the price of food. If he refused
to work at the wages offered, or went out of his county in search of
higher wages, he became in the eye of the law a rogue and vagabond.
The laws against such were exceedingly severe. Any person for the
first time found ‘wandering or roguing about,’ was to be whipped on
his naked back until his body was bloody, and then sent from parish
to parish straightway to the place of his birth; or, if this was not
known, then to ‘the parish where he last dwelt for the space of a year’
(49th Eliz., 1597). “Poor Tom,” says Edgar, in _King Lear_, when he
plays the madman, “who is whipped from tything to tything, and stocked
and punished and imprisoned.” In order that the vagrant might be
recognized, he was to be branded on the left shoulder with the letter
R, and if a second time found begging or wandering about was to be
adjudged a felon and hanged (2nd James I., 1604). This barbarous law,
though probably not often enforced to its whole extent, was quite in
keeping with the criminal legislation of the time, which condemned the
thief, who stole any article above ten shillings in value, to die as a
felon on the gallows.
%POOR LAWS.%
Before the sixteenth century lords had naturally been expected to
provide for the old age of their villeins, whose lives had been spent
for their profit. But after villeinage became extinct, private charity
was not openhanded enough to maintain the impotent poor, and the
Government found it necessary to legislate in their favour. During the
sixteenth century, the earliest of the poor-laws were passed. Statutes
of Henry VIII. empower the justices of the peace to give licences
to impotent persons to beg within certain limits, and also order
collections for the relief of the poor to be made in church on Sundays
and holidays (22nd, 27th Henry VIII.). In the reign of Elizabeth,
laws were passed, rendering these alms compulsory, and appointing in
every parish overseers of the poor. These overseers were to consist
of the churchwardens, together with three or four householders, to
be appointed by the justices of the peace. The justices of the peace
were further ordered to build houses of correction in waste places,
where the impotent might be maintained, and the strong found idling
or out of employ be set to work (5th, 43rd, 49th Eliz.). No means,
however, were taken to see that these statutes were put into force;
wanderers were branded, but workhouses were not built. “I have heard
rogues and vagabonds,” says a pamphlet writer, “curse the magistrates
to their faces, for providing such a law to whip and brand them,
when no place is provided to set them to work.” These complaints were
not ill-founded; and, in 1610, a statute was passed, that justices of
the peace who neglected to build houses of correction should be fined
£5 each. James I., in alarm at the beggars in London, usurped the
legislative power, and issued a proclamation to the effect, that as
rogues grew to be dangerous to himself and his court, they were to be
banished to Newfoundland, the East and West Indies, Spain, or the Low
Countries. Though the poor laws of Elizabeth and James do not forbid
the labourer to remove from the place of his birth, they practically
prevent migration by classing the man who is without a master, or
refuses to work at the wages offered, under the same category as
rogues and vagabonds. The Law of Settlement, passed immediately after
the Restoration, actually bound the labourers to the soil (1662). It
enacted that if any person came to settle in a parish and occupied
a tenement under the yearly value of £10, the justices of the peace
should have power to remove him back to the parish where he was last
settled for the space of forty days. Roger North, writing in 1688,
thus described the fatal effects of this pernicious law. “Surely, it
is a great imprisonment, if not slavery, to a poor family to be under
restraint by law, that they must always live in one place, whether they
have friends, kindred, employment, or not. Such persons, if they had
spirits, have no encouragement to aspire to a better condition, since
being born poor and in a place which gives no means to be otherwise,
they are not allowed to go and search it elsewhere; and if they find
it, they are not permitted to entertain it. Then their spirits sink,
and they fall into a sottish way of living, depend on the parish, who
must however wretchedly maintain them.” Two motives prevented the
repeal of a law which was thus early allowed by intelligent men to
be injurious--the one, the selfish desire of employers of labour to
force the labourers to take work at the wages offered; the other, the
selfish desire of ratepayers to limit as far as possible the number of
poor in their own parish.[168] In the reigns of James and Charles I.,
a labourer generally received from eightpence to one shilling a day,
or from four shillings to six shillings a week, without board. As,
however, four shillings then would buy as much as fourteen now, his
living was not inferior to that of many agricultural labourers at the
present time. So much land, moreover, still remained unenclosed, that
he probably possessed a bit of garden-ground attached to his cottage,
and fed his cow, or pig, or flock of geese, on the neighbouring common.
His ordinary fare was rye-bread, barley-meal, onions, carrots, bacon,
and beer. Vegetables common now, were then rarities. Potatoes, first
brought from America by Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, sold at two
shillings a pound. Articles of clothing, candles, salt, sugar, and
wheaten bread, were all much dearer than they now are, though meat
and beer were much cheaper. The wages of artificers and those engaged
in manufactures were also fixed by the justices of the peace; and
generally ranged at about one shilling a day. At Kidderminster there
were few beggars, the common trade of stuff-weaving providing work for
men, women, and children. ‘But none were very wealthy, as the wages
only served to provide food and raiment.’[169] Some of the master
workmen got one shilling and eightpence a day. There were no large
factories, as little machinery had been introduced, but weaving and
other manufacturing processes were carried on in the poor people’s
homes by hand labour. Though the table of wages of the seventeenth
century may not compare unfavourably with that of the nineteenth, in
other respects a great improvement has taken place in the material
condition of the working classes. In the seventeenth century the
ravages of fire, disease, and famine often inflicted a greater amount
of suffering than a war would now bring upon the country. Destructive
fires took place periodically in most towns, for the houses were all
of wood, and there were no appliances at hand with which to quench
the flames. Whether the town were wholly or partially destroyed
depended principally upon the direction of the wind at the time of
the breaking out of the fire. Owing to an utter neglect of the laws
of health, villages and towns were subject to the visitation of
frightful plagues and diseases, for which no remedies were known. At
such times the deaths in London would increase by several thousands a
week.[170] Famines were common in England then, for the same reasons
as they are now in India. The badness of the roads prevented any rapid
communication from one part of the country to another, so that the
people in Yorkshire might be near starving from lack of bread, while
those in Kent possessed a superfluity of corn. It was customary to
travel with a coach and four horses, not from ideas of grandeur or
speed, but because otherwise there was no chance of getting through the
bogs. Often a coach would be six or eight hours in going a distance of
twelve miles. An overset was not the worst danger that might befall
the traveller.
♦Highwaymen.♦ He sometimes had to pass through gloomy forests and over
far-stretching heaths without seeing a single enclosed field for a
distance of forty or even fifty miles, and under these circumstances,
it was a lucky chance if he came to his journey’s end without being
stopped by a band of highwaymen and robbed of money and goods. At
the close of the civil war, many Cavaliers, finding they had ruined
themselves in the service of the king, took to the road, and ended
their lives on the gallows. Thus, in 1656, a notable highwayman was
secured, the chief of a company which had robbed the carrier of York
of £1500. “And it is reported,” says the newspaper, “that he and his
companions have, in little more than a twelvemonth’s time, robbed
to the value of £11,000; [and have taken] so great sums of money at
a time, that, instead of telling it, they shared it by the quart
pot.”[171]
♦Post-office.♦ Charles was the first to establish a post-office,
to carry letters between London, Edinburgh, Chester, Holyhead, and
other towns. The charge was twopence a letter on any distance under
eighty miles. During the war, the post fell into disuse, but was
re-established on the return of peace.
%LONDON.%
London itself was the centre of trade, wealth, and intelligence.
♦Corporation of London.♦ It was, as it still is, a chartered or
self-governed town. The city was divided into twenty-six wards.
The householders or freemen of every ward elected the members of a
common council, which formed the legislative body of the corporation,
making bye-laws and police regulations to be of force within the
city boundaries. The aldermen were also elected by the householders,
and these with the lord mayor were the principal magistrates. In the
Old Bailey they had an independent criminal court for the trial of
treasons, murders, and felonies, committed within the city of London
and the County of Middlesex. The independence and power of the city
have been shown in the previous history. The Guildhall was the asylum
of the five members of the Parliament. Without the support of the
corporation, that is to say, of freemen, common council, and city
aldermen, the Parliament could never have commenced the war with the
king; at a later hour, when the corporation went with the Presbyterians
for the king, the Independent leaders, though backed by a veteran
army, were greatly weakened by the defection. The city had supplied
the sinews of war; indeed, from no other town in England could enough
money have been borrowed to pay the troops of the Parliament. Had the
king had the city at his back, he need never have been bankrupt, and
might have checked the marauding habits of his army. It was in fact
in London that the richest merchants of the kingdom were collected.
The nobles themselves had not houses more magnificent, furniture more
costly and collections of pictures and rarities more valuable. The
Thames served as a highway between the city and Westminster. There
were numbers of public landing-places, where boatmen waited to ferry
passengers to any part up and down the river, or over to Southwark.
Old London Bridge was the one bridge that had then been built; the
highway across, passing under gateways and flanked by houses, gave
it the appearance of a castellated street. Some noblemen still lived
in the Strand, and had gardens attached to their dwellings, sloping
down to the river’s edge, with private landing-places; but the more
fashionable quarter was now further west, about Covent Garden and Drury
Lane. Though London was then considered of enormous size, on the east
it hardly extended beyond the Tower; on the west it touched the city
of Westminster. In the north, around the old Convent or Covent Garden,
Inigo Jones had lately designed new streets, connecting the City with
St. Giles’, then really a hamlet in-the-Fields. The old houses were
all of timber, with high-gabled roofs, and stories jutting out one
above the other. As few could read, not only every tavern, but every
shop, possessed its signboard, and the streets presented a succession
of Cross Keys, Three Pigeons, Golden Lambs, Ships, and Black Swans.
The principal streets alone were paved, and these merely with little
round jolting stones. The dirt was frightful. Into the kennel, or open
gutter-like sewer, refuse was thrown out of houses and shops, and
there rotted and reeked until it was carried away by the rain to Fleet
Ditch and the Thames. Rain, in fact, did yeoman’s service, though the
pipes on the house-roofs first conducted their contents to the heads
of passers-by. Kites and ravens were kept to act as scavengers, and
the bonfires lighted on every occasion of rejoicing served a good
purpose in occasionally consuming the rubbish. The streets, before the
great fire, were rather to be called alleys; in some, friends could
shake hands across from the projecting upper stories. Coaches had been
introduced into England from Germany about 1580. Some enterprising man,
a few years later, set up hackney-coaches in London, and in 1634 there
were said to be 1900 such vehicles ready for hire in the streets. Sedan
chairs followed. The first was brought by Buckingham from Spain. The
street mob hooted at the hated favourite, regarding it as a ‘mastering
pride’ in him to be borne upon men’s shoulders; but the convenience of
the conveyance overcame prejudice, and, like coaches, sedan chairs were
soon in common use.
%APPRENTICES.%
Hyde Park was a fashionable drive, where coach-races were sometimes
held. Spring Gardens, opening into St. James’ Park, was a favourite
resort of ladies and gentlemen. There was drinking going on always
under the trees, and quarrels took place two or three times a week.
Cromwell, much to the discontent of Royalists, caused both gardens and
park to be closed for months.[172] Before the breaking out of the
Civil War, St. Paul’s Cathedral had been used as a daily lounging and
meeting-place by people of every rank and profession. Its uses were,
perhaps, less worldly when it became the stable of the sectarian
horse during the war. The streets were always a Babel of sounds.
Masters or their apprentices stood at the shop doors, touting for
customers with cries of ‘What d’ye lack, sir--what d’ye please to
lack?’ Fish-wives, orange-women, broom-men, chimney-sweepers, with the
original costard-applemongers, passed up and down, crying their wares
or services. Over this motley crowd hung the warning gallows, occupying
a prominent position outside the Old Bailey on Ludgate Hill. Felons
and others were hung there every Monday morning. Riots and scuffles
often took place. We have seen how ready the populace of London was to
rise, and how rival parties in Parliament raised mobs to intimidate
their opponents. On all such occasions the apprentices took a leading
part. There was a strong class feeling and close union amongst them.
The apprentice was bound to his master for seven years, after which
he might set up in business for himself, and rise if he could to be
a member of the Common Council, a City Alderman, and even sworn Lord
Mayor of London. If an apprentice were assaulted, he raised the cry of
‘’Prentices, clubs!’ and out of every shop in the street rushed friends
to the rescue. The students of the Inns of Court, mostly gentlemen
by birth and Royalist at heart, felt themselves natural enemies of
Presbyterian shopkeepers, and a standing feud produced frequent fights
between Templars and apprentices. Like the athletic sports of the
time--boating, bowling, shooting, football, cudgelling--the London
street fights helped to form the raw material of a soldiery. Formerly
the London train-bands had been famous for their archers. The Artillery
Company had been originally formed in 1585 by volunteer citizens and
officers, when the country was threatened with invasion; and from this
small beginning had developed the new set of train-bands raised upon
the breaking out of the Civil War. These, however, were not used as
police, and the citizen of London had to trust in the strength of his
own arm to defend his property and life from the assaults of thieves
and robbers. There were no street lamps, though, indeed, an order
existed for every householder to hang out a lanthorn over his door at
night; and at stated times bellmen walked the streets, ringing their
bells, and crying, ‘Hang out your lanthorns!’ The order, however, seems
to have been but little observed, so that the city remained practically
unlighted. Standing watchmen, who remained at their posts only till
one or two o’clock in the morning, formed but an inefficient police,
and, when it grew dark, even the chief streets grew dangerous for all
but the well-armed. London was, indeed, the head-quarters of thieves
and rogues of all descriptions, and the exercise of their profession
required but little ingenuity or caution. The country gentleman was
known to them at once by his manners, his accent, and the cut of his
clothes. While he, a stranger in the great city, was gazing upon the
new sights round him, thieves cut the string of his purse, which he
wore, as was the custom, attached to his girdle. Sharpers prevailed
upon him to enter taverns in their company, where his pockets were soon
emptied of his cash. In the intervals of business, all rogues could
find an asylum in Whitefriars, which took its name from a house of
white-hooded friars; before the Reformation it had been a sanctuary for
criminals, and still remained one for debtors. Accordingly, not only
bankrupts and debtors, but highwaymen, false witnesses, robbers, and
murderers herded together in Whitefriars and other congenial haunts,
where the officers of justice dared not enter unattended by a guard of
musketeers.[173]
%SOCIAL STATE OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.%
A very slight comparison of the England of to-day with the England of
the seventeenth century is sufficient to show what a vast advance has
been made in the material condition of the country. Yet, because an
efficient police system now renders roads and streets nearly as safe
by night as by day; because the population has more than quadrupled;
because towns have sprung up where once were villages; because trade
has increased to an extent far beyond the vision of the statesmen of
the Long Parliament; because science has done much to prolong life
and alleviate suffering--it would be a great mistake to suppose that,
because of these things merely, future generations will regard the
nineteenth century as superior to those before it. The men of the time
of James I. and Charles I. are not now allowed any special credit,
because in travelling they used coaches instead of riding on horseback;
because they built better houses than their great-grandfathers, and
slept on softer beds; because they had more wealth, more knowledge,
and more refinement; all this was the result of work done before they
were born. Material well-being must, in the first instance, spring
from certain qualities of mind, and the people who, while they have
inherited the well-being, have lost the qualities of mind which enabled
their ancestors to bequeath it them, are far less likely to be at the
highest than at the lowest stage of their career. The claim of any
age to the respect and gratitude of posterity rests on the manner in
which it dealt with its own special problems. Judged by this test,
the patriots of the seventeenth century can never be found wanting.
It has taken a course of two hundred years but to polish off the work
that they rough-hewed. The material advantages now enjoyed spring in
great part from the principles then so boldly maintained. Science
cannot flourish in a land where men are imprisoned for speaking and
writing what they believe; trade cannot flourish amid the shackles of
monopolies and restrictive laws; abuses will rarely be reformed, or bad
laws abolished, where the light of free discussion never penetrates.
On the other hand, the mistakes of their age may be warnings for other
generations: to take a single instance, the history of the witchcraft
laws shows that education is vital to the morality of a state, and
that the association of false theories with cherished beliefs is a
means by which cruel and heartless oppression may win the support of
religion and piety. The problems of the present century are distinct
from those of the seventeenth, but, perhaps, no less important. Two or
three hundred years hence it may be possible to form a fair judgment
of the manner in which those problems have been treated. It may well
be doubted whether future generations will allow that they owe us as
great a debt of gratitude as we and they owe the men whose judgment,
fortitude, and self-sacrifice alone prevented the establishment of
arbitrary government in England.
FOOTNOTES:
[154] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iii. 457.
[155] “It cometh many times to pass,” says Bacon, “that ‘_materiam
superabit opus_’--that the work and carriage is more worth than the
material, and enricheth a State more; as is notably seen in the Low
Countries, who have the best mines above ground in the world.”--BACON’S
ESSAYS, xv.
[156] Bancroft, Hist. Am. i.
[157] The Water Poet (temp. Charles I.)
[158] Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 349, apud Taine, II. i. 3.
[159] Jermyn debauched Lord Grandison’s sister, Miss Villiers; this
incident was important, as it first led Hyde, a connection of the
lady, into a correspondence with the king, whom Hyde tried to get to
act firmly in the matter. Such misconduct, however, in no way impaired
Jermyn’s influence with the queen, who not only supported him against
the king at home, but afterwards kept him by her as her constant
companion abroad.--LISTER’S LIFE OF CLARENDON.
[160] Harris, Life of Cromwell.
[161] Evelyn, 196, 261; Chambers, 569, 599.
[162] Though a committee of Parliament was appointed to investigate
the state of prisons in 1729, no reforms were made for another half
century. In 1773 John Howard began his tour of inspection. He lived to
see many reforms introduced, both in the condition of prisons and the
treatment of prisoners, the results of his own noble efforts.
[163] Whitelock, Mem., 450.
[164] Roger North, Life of Lord Guildford; Somers, iii.; Trial of
Lancashire Witches.
[165] Life of Lord North; Beesley, Hist. of Banbury; Cullum, Hist. of
Hawsted; Evelyn, Diary.
[166] See p. 2.
[167] Rushworth, Abr., ii., 191.
[168] The law, having thus forbidden the labourer to move from his
parish to seek work for himself, was compelled to provide for him. If
the overseers could not find him full employment, they were required to
make up any deficiency in wages out of rates. In consequence of this
system, farmers purposely underpaid their labourers, knowing the parish
could not refuse relief, while the labourers themselves were deprived
of any motive for self-exertion. As the overseers were not appointed
by the ratepayers, there was no check upon the expenditure, and the
poor-rates rose with extraordinary rapidity. In 1760, the population
was 7,000,000; the rates were £1,250,000. In 1834, the population
had rather more than doubled, being 14,372,000, the poor-rates had
increased by more than five times, £6,317,235. In 1834, the Reformed
Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act. A central authority
was created--a board of three commissioners, with power to regulate
the administration of relief throughout England and Wales. Parishes
were united into unions, directed by boards of guardians, of whom
the majority were elected by the ratepayers. The commissioners put
an end to the allowance system, only granting outdoor relief to the
able-bodied poor in exceptional cases. This Act made no alteration in
the Law of Settlement. The 35th George III. had already prohibited the
removal from a parish of any newcomer, until he should have become
actually chargeable (1795). The 9th and 10th Victoria prohibits the
removal of any person who shall have resided five years in a parish
without being chargeable. The 11th and 12th Vict. relieves the parish
of the cost of maintaining persons who have so become chargeable, and
lays it on the common fund of the union. The continuance of the Laws
of Settlement to the present time is consequent upon the principle,
that every parish, however poor itself, is bound to relieve its own
poor. The entire abolition of these is still required, as well as the
universal substitution of union instead of parochial chargeability;
and, where necessary, an equalization of the poor-rates over wider
areas than a single union presents.--NICHOLLS ON THE POOR LAWS.
CHITTY’S STATUTES.
[169] Baxter’s Life, 33.
[170] The deaths from plague in London were:--
11,503 in 1592
30,583 in 1603
35,428 in 1625
1,317 in 1630
12,102 in 1636
2,876 in 1637
STATE PAPERS, 1637.
[171] Cromwelliana.
[172] Evelyn, Diary; Knight, i. 191; Character of England, Somers
Tracts, vii.
[173] In 1697 an Act of Parliament was passed, abolishing the
privileges of Whitefriars and of the Savoy, another haunt of the same
kind. See Macaulay, chap. xxii.