Middle Ages, to get an estimate of the work they had done, if not
towards perfection in their institutions, at least towards attaining the
knowledge of political truth, this is what we find: Representative
government, which was unknown to the ancients, was almost universal. The
methods of election were crude; but the principle that no tax was lawful
that was not granted by the class that paid it--that is, that taxation
was inseparable from representation--was recognised, not as the
privilege of certain countries, but as the right of all. Not a prince in
the world, said Philip de Commines, can levy a penny without the consent
of the people. Slavery was almost everywhere extinct; and absolute power
was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery. The right of
insurrection was not only admitted but defined, as a duty sanctioned by
religion. Even the principles of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the method
of the Income Tax, were already known. The issue of ancient politics was
an absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce of the
Middle Ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by
the representation of powerful classes, by privileged associations, and
by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by
man.
As regards the realisation in practice of what was seen to be good,
there was almost everything to do. But the great problems of principle
had been solved, and we come to the question, How did the sixteenth
century husband the treasure which the Middle Ages had stored up? The
most visible sign of the times was the decline of the religious
influence that had reigned so long. Sixty years passed after the
invention of printing, and thirty thousand books had issued from
European presses, before anybody undertook to print the Greek Testament.
In the days when every State made the unity of faith its first care, it
came to be thought that the rights of men, and the duties of neighbours
and of rulers towards them, varied according to their religion; and
society did not acknowledge the same obligations to a Turk or a Jew, a
pagan or a heretic, or a devil worshipper, as to an orthodox Christian.
As the ascendency of religion grew weaker, this privilege of treating
its enemies on exceptional principles was claimed by the State for its
own benefit; and the idea that the ends of government justify the means
employed was worked into system by Machiavelli. He was an acute
politician, sincerely anxious that the obstacles to the intelligent
government of Italy should be swept away. It appeared to him that the
most vexatious obstacle to intellect is conscience, and that the
vigorous use of statecraft necessary for the success of difficult
schemes would never be made if governments allowed themselves to be
hampered by the precepts of the copy-book.
His audacious doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age by men whose
personal character stood high. They saw that in critical times good men
have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have
grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you
are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from
private, because no Government can turn the other cheek, or can admit
that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the
difference or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard
for a nation's acts there is than the judgment which Heaven pronounces
in this world by success.
Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary
government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of
good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing
the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad
very much alike. Charles V. offered 5000 crowns for the murder of an
enemy. Ferdinand I. and Ferdinand II., Henry III. and Louis XIII., each
caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously despatched.
Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way
was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and
institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by
a studied philosophy of crime and so thorough a perversion of the moral
sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the
morality of paganism.
The clergy, who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom during
the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery, were associated now
with the interest of royalty. Attempts had been made to reform the
Church on the Constitutional model; they had failed, but they had united
the hierarchy and the crown against the system of divided power as
against a common enemy. Strong kings were able to bring the spirituality
under subjection in France and Spain, in Sicily and in England. The
absolute monarchy of France was built up in the two following centuries
by twelve political cardinals. The kings of Spain obtained the same
effect almost at a single stroke by reviving and appropriating to their
own use the tribunal of the Inquisition, which had been growing
obsolete, but now served to arm them with terrors which effectually made
them despotic. One generation beheld the change all over Europe, from
the anarchy of the days of the Roses to the passionate submission, the
gratified acquiescence in tyranny that marks the reign of Henry VIII.
and the kings of his time.
The tide was running fast when the Reformation began at Wittenberg, and
it was to be expected that Luther's influence would stem the flood of
absolutism. For he was confronted everywhere by the compact alliance of
the Church with the State; and great part of his country was governed by
hostile potentates who were prelates of the Court of Rome. He had,
indeed, more to fear from temporal than from spiritual foes. The leading
German bishops wished that the Protestant demands should be conceded;
and the Pope himself vainly urged on the Emperor a conciliatory policy.
But Charles V. had outlawed Luther, and attempted to waylay him; and the
Dukes of Bavaria were active in beheading and burning his disciples,
whilst the democracy of the towns generally took his side. But the dread
of revolution was the deepest of his political sentiments; and the gloss
by which the Guelphic divines had got over the passive obedience of the
apostolic age was characteristic of that mediaeval method of
interpretation which he rejected. He swerved for a moment in his later
years; but the substance of his political teaching was eminently
conservative, the Lutheran States became the stronghold of rigid
immobility, and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic
literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation. For the
Swiss reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing up their cause
with politics. Zurich and Geneva were Republics, and the spirit of their
governments influenced both Zwingli and Calvin.
Zwingli indeed did not shrink from the mediaeval doctrine that evil
magistrates must be cashiered; but he was killed too early to act either
deeply or permanently on the political character of Protestantism.
Calvin, although a Republican, judged that the people are unfit to
govern themselves, and declared the popular assembly an abuse that ought
to be abolished. He desired an aristocracy of the elect, armed with the
means of punishing not only crime but vice and error. For he thought
that the severity of the mediaeval laws was insufficient for the need of
the times; and he favoured the most irresistible weapon which the
inquisitorial procedure put into the hand of the Government, the right
of subjecting prisoners to intolerable torture, not because they were
guilty, but because their guilt could not be proved. His teaching,
though not calculated to promote popular institutions, was so adverse to
the authority of the surrounding monarchs, that he softened down the
expression of his political views in the French edition of his
_Institutes_.
The direct political influence of the Reformation effected less than has
been supposed. Most States were strong enough to control it. Some, by
intense exertion, shut out the pouring flood. Others, with consummate
skill, diverted it to their own uses. The Polish Government alone at
that time left it to its course. Scotland was the only kingdom in which
the Reformation triumphed over the resistance of the State; and Ireland
was the only instance where it failed, in spite of Government support.
But in almost every other case, both the princes that spread their
canvas to the gale and those that faced it, employed the zeal, the
alarm, the passions it aroused as instruments for the increase of power.
Nations eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed to
preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church and State asunder,
and to prevent the confusion of their powers, which had been the work of
ages, was renounced in the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were
done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy
was the motive.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses, but the masses were rarely
fanaticised, and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the
calculations of dispassionate politicians. When the King of France
undertook to kill all the Protestants, he was obliged to do it by his
own agents. It was nowhere the spontaneous act of the population, and in
many towns and in entire provinces the magistrates refused to obey. The
motive of the Court was so far from mere fanaticism that the Queen
immediately challenged Elizabeth to do the like to the English
Catholics. Francis I. and Henry II. sent nearly a hundred Huguenots to
the stake, but they were cordial and assiduous promoters of the
Protestant religion in Germany. Sir Nicholas Bacon was one of the
ministers who suppressed the mass in England. Yet when the Huguenot
refugees came over he liked them so little that he reminded Parliament
of the summary way in which Henry V. at Agincourt dealt with the
Frenchmen who fell into his hands. John Knox thought that every Catholic
in Scotland ought to be put to death, and no man ever had disciples of a
sterner or more relentless temper. But his counsel was not followed.
All through the religious conflict policy kept the upper hand. When the
last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the
nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin
preached and Bellarmine lectured, but Machiavelli reigned. Before the
close of the century three events occurred which mark the beginning of a
momentous change. The massacre of St. Bartholomew convinced the bulk of
Calvinists of the lawfulness of rebellion against tyrants, and they
became advocates of that doctrine in which the Bishop of Winchester had
led the way,[4] and which Knox and Buchanan had received, through their
master at Paris, straight from the mediaeval schools. Adopted out of
aversion to the King of France, it was soon put in practice against the
King of Spain. The revolted Netherlands, by a solemn Act, deposed Philip
II., and made themselves independent under the Prince of Orange, who had
been, and continued to be, styled his Lieutenant. Their example was
important, not only because subjects of one religion deposed a monarch
of another, for that had been seen in Scotland, but because, moreover,
it put a republic in the place of a monarchy, and forced the public law
of Europe to recognise the accomplished revolution. At the same time,
the French Catholics, rising against Henry III., who was the most
contemptible of tyrants, and against his heir, Henry of Navarre, who, as
a Protestant, repelled the majority of the nation, fought for the same
principles with sword and pen.
Many shelves might be filled with the books which came out in their
defence during half a century, and they include the most comprehensive
treatises on laws ever written. Nearly all are vitiated by the defect
which disfigured political literature in the Middle Ages. That
literature, as I have tried to show, is extremely remarkable, and its
services in aiding human progress are very great. But from the death of
St. Bernard until the appearance of Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_, there
was hardly a writer who did not make his politics subservient to the
interest of either Pope or King. And those who came after the
Reformation were always thinking of laws as they might affect Catholics
or Protestants. Knox thundered against what he called _the Monstrous
Regiment of Women_, because the Queen went to mass, and Mariana praised
the assassin of Henry III. because the King was in league with
Huguenots. For the belief that it is right to murder tyrants, first
taught among Christians, I believe, by John of Salisbury, the most
distinguished English writer of the twelfth century, and confirmed by
Roger Bacon, the most celebrated Englishman of the thirteenth, had
acquired about this time a fatal significance. Nobody sincerely thought
of politics as a law for the just and the unjust, or tried to find out a
set of principles that should hold good alike under all changes of
religion. Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ stands almost alone among the
works I am speaking of, and is still read with admiration by every
thoughtful man as the earliest and one of the finest prose classics in
our language. But though few of the others have survived, they
contributed to hand down masculine notions of limited authority and
conditional obedience from the epoch of theory to generations of free
men. Even the coarse violence of Buchanan and Boucher was a link in the
chain of tradition that connects the Hildebrandine controversy with the
Long Parliament, and St. Thomas with Edmund Burke.
That men should understand that governments do not exist by divine
right, and that arbitrary government is the violation of divine right,
was no doubt the medicine suited to the malady under which Europe
languished. But although the knowledge of this truth might become an
element of salutary destruction, it could give little aid to progress
and reform. Resistance to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a
legal government in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing, but it
is better still that the offender should live for repentance and
reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics between good
and evil, and make States worthy to last, were not yet found.
The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least demoralised by
party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for a cause. In a passage almost
literally taken from St. Thomas, he describes our subordination under a
law of nature, to which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains
it not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of universal
reason, through which God enlightens the consciences of men. Upon this
foundation Grotius drew the lines of real political science. In
gathering the materials of international law, he had to go beyond
national treaties and denominational interests for a principle embracing
all mankind. The principles of law must stand, he said, even if we
suppose that there is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that
they must be found independently of revelation. From that time it became
possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience, so
that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace
together, under the sanctions of a common law. Grotius himself used his
discovery to little purpose, as he deprived it of immediate effect by
admitting that the right to reign may be enjoyed as a freehold, subject
to no conditions.
When Cumberland and Pufendorf unfolded the true significance of his
doctrine, every settled authority, every triumphant interest recoiled
aghast. None were willing to surrender advantages won by force or skill,
because they might be in contradiction, not with the Ten Commandments,
but with an unknown code, which Grotius himself had not attempted to
draw up, and touching which no two philosophers agreed. It was manifest
that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of
conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their
adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them
would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the
plea of good intentions, which softens down the asperities of religious
strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century
repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius,
that there are certain political truths by which every State and every
interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a
series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the
lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an
irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies
and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron
and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side. Year after year, the
assemblies that represented the self-government of provinces and of
privileged classes, all over the Continent, met for the last time and
passed away, to the satisfaction of the people, who had learned to
venerate the throne as the constructor of their unity, the promoter of
prosperity and power, the defender of orthodoxy, and the employer of
talent.
The Bourbons, who had snatched the crown from a rebellious democracy,
the Stuarts, who had come in as usurpers, set up the doctrine that
States are formed by the valour, the policy, and the appropriate
marriages of the royal family; that the king is consequently anterior to
the people, that he is its maker rather than its handiwork, and reigns
independently of consent. Theology followed up divine right with passive
obedience. In the golden age of religious science, Archbishop Ussher,
the most learned of Anglican prelates, and Bossuet, the ablest of the
French, declared that resistance to kings is a crime, and that they may
lawfully employ compulsion against the faith of their subjects. The
philosophers heartily supported the divines. Bacon fixed his hope of all
human progress on the strong hand of kings. Descartes advised them to
crush all those who might be able to resist their power. Hobbes taught
that authority is always in the right. Pascal considered it absurd to
reform laws, or to set up an ideal justice against actual force. Even
Spinoza, who was a Republican and a Jew, assigned to the State the
absolute control of religion.
Monarchy exerted a charm over the imagination, so unlike the
unceremonious spirit of the Middle Ages, that, on learning the execution
of Charles I., men died of the shock; and the same thing occurred at the
death of Louis XVI. and of the Duke of Enghien. The classic land of
absolute monarchy was France. Richelieu held that it would be impossible
to keep the people down if they were suffered to be well off. The
Chancellor affirmed that France could not be governed without the right
of arbitrary arrest and exile; and that in case of danger to the State
it may be well that a hundred innocent men should perish. The Minister
of Finance called it sedition to demand that the Crown should keep
faith. One who lived on intimate terms with Louis XIV. says that even
the slightest disobedience to the royal will is a crime to be punished
with death. Louis employed these precepts to their fullest extent. He
candidly avows that kings are no more bound by the terms of a treaty
than by the words of a compliment; and that there is nothing in the
possession of their subjects which they may not lawfully take from them.
In obedience to this principle, when Marshal Vauban, appalled by the
misery of the people, proposed that all existing imposts should be
repealed for a single tax that would be less onerous, the King took his
advice, but retained all the old taxes whilst he imposed the new. With
half the present population, he maintained an army of 450,000 men;
nearly twice as large as that which the late Emperor Napoleon assembled
to attack Germany. Meanwhile the people starved on grass. France, said
Fenelon, is one enormous hospital. French historians believe that in a
single generation six millions of people died of want. It would be easy
to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Louis
XIV., but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater
suffering or greater wrong; and the admiration with which he inspired
the most illustrious men of his time denotes the lowest depth to which
the turpitude of absolutism has ever degraded the conscience of Europe.
The Republics of that day were, for the most part, so governed as to
reconcile men with the less opprobrious vices of monarchy. Poland was a
State made up of centrifugal forces. What the nobles called liberty was
the right of each of them to veto the acts of the Diet, and to persecute
the peasants on his estates--rights which they refused to surrender up
to the time of the partition, and thus verified the warning of a
preacher spoken long ago: "You will perish, not by invasion or war, but
by your infernal liberties." Venice suffered from the opposite evil of
excessive concentration. It was the most sagacious of Governments, and
would rarely have made mistakes if it had not imputed to others motives
as wise as its own, and had taken account of passions and follies of
which it had little cognisance. But the supreme power of the nobility
had passed to a committee, from the committee to a Council of Ten, from
the Ten to three Inquisitors of State; and in this intensely centralised
form it became, about the year 1600, a frightful despotism. I have shown
you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the
consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice
required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was
provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analysed the wants and
resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is
poison. As late as a century ago, Venetian senators of honourable and
even religious lives employed assassins for the public good with no more
compunction than Philip II. or Charles IX.
The Swiss Cantons, especially Geneva, profoundly influenced opinion in
the days preceding the French Revolution, but they had had no part in
the earlier movement to inaugurate the reign of law. That honour belongs
to the Netherlands alone among the Commonwealths. They earned it, not by
their form of government, which was defective and precarious, for the
Orange party perpetually plotted against it, and slew the two most
eminent of the Republican statesmen, and William III. himself intrigued
for English aid to set the crown upon his head; but by the freedom of
the press, which made Holland the vantage-ground from which, in the
darkest hour of oppression, the victims of the oppressors obtained the
ear of Europe.
The ordinance of Louis XIV., that every French Protestant should
immediately renounce his religion, went out in the year in which James
II. became king. The Protestant refugees did what their ancestors had
done a century before. They asserted the deposing power of subjects over
rulers who had broken the original contract between them, and all the
Powers, excepting France, countenanced their argument, and sent forth
William of Orange on that expedition which was the faint dawn of a
brighter day.
It is to this unexampled combination of things on the Continent, more
than to her own energy, that England owes her deliverance. The efforts
made by the Scots, by the Irish, and at last by the Long Parliament to
get rid of the misrule of the Stuarts had been foiled, not by the
resistance of Monarchy, but by the helplessness of the Republic. State
and Church were swept away; new institutions were raised up under the
ablest ruler that had ever sprung from a revolution; and England,
seething with the toil of political thought, had produced at least two
writers who in many directions saw as far and as clearly as we do now.
But Cromwell's Constitution was rolled up like a scroll; Harrington and
Lilburne were laughed at for a time and forgotten, the country confessed
the failure of its striving, disavowed its aims, and flung itself with
enthusiasm, and without any effective stipulations, at the feet of a
worthless king.
If the people of England had accomplished no more than this to relieve
mankind from the pervading pressure of unlimited monarchy, they would
have done more harm than good. By the fanatical treachery with which,
violating the Parliament and the law, they contrived the death of King
Charles, by the ribaldry of the Latin pamphlet with which Milton
justified the act before the world, by persuading the world that the
Republicans were hostile alike to liberty and to authority, and did not
believe in themselves, they gave strength and reason to the current of
Royalism, which, at the Restoration, overwhelmed their work. If there
had been nothing to make up for this defect of certainty and of
constancy in politics England would have gone the way of other nations.