have been a favourite corrective of democracy with many thoughtful
politicians. Where the extent of the electoral district obliges
constituents to vote for candidates who are unknown to them, the
election is not free. It is managed by wire-pullers, and by party
machinery, beyond the control of the electors. Indirect election puts
the choice of the managers into their hands. The objection is that the
intermediate electors are generally too few to span the interval between
voters and candidates, and that they choose representatives not of
better quality, but of different politics. If the intermediate body
consisted of one in ten of the whole constituency, the contact would be
preserved, the people would be really represented, and the ticket system
would be broken down.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or
rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force
or fraud, in carrying elections. To break off that point is to avert the
danger. The common system of representation perpetuates the danger.
Unequal electorates afford no security to majorities. Equal electorates
give none to minorities. Thirty-five years ago it was pointed out that
the remedy is proportional representation. It is profoundly democratic,
for it increases the influence of thousands who would otherwise have no
voice in the government; and it brings men more near an equality by so
contriving that no vote shall be wasted, and that every voter shall
contribute to bring into Parliament a member of his own opinions. The
origin of the idea is variously claimed for Lord Grey and for
Considerant. The successful example of Denmark and the earnest advocacy
of Mill gave it prominence in the world of politics. It has gained
popularity with the growth of democracy, and we are informed by M.
Naville that in Switzerland Conservatives and Radicals combined to
promote it.
Of all checks on democracy, federalism has been the most efficacious and
the most congenial; but, becoming associated with the Red Republic, with
feudalism, with the Jesuits, and with slavery, it has fallen into
disrepute, and is giving way to centralism. The federal system limits
and restrains the sovereign power by dividing it, and by assigning to
Government only certain defined rights. It is the only method of curbing
not only the majority but the power of the whole people, and it affords
the strongest basis for a second chamber, which has been found the
essential security for freedom in every genuine democracy.
The fall of Guizot discredited the famous maxim of the Doctrinaires,
that Reason is sovereign, and not king or people; and it was further
exposed to the scoffer by the promise of Comte that Positivist
philosophers shall manufacture political ideas, which no man shall be
permitted to dispute. But putting aside international and criminal law,
in which there is some approach to uniformity, the domain of political
economy seems destined to admit the rigorous certainty of science.
Whenever that shall be attained, when the battle between Economists and
Socialists is ended, the evil force which Socialism imparts to democracy
will be spent. The battle is raging more violently than ever, but it has
entered into a new phase, by the rise of a middle party. Whether that
remarkable movement, which is promoted by some of the first economists
in Europe, is destined to shake the authority of their science, or to
conquer socialism, by robbing it of that which is the secret of its
strength, it must be recorded here as the latest and the most serious
effort that has been made to disprove the weighty sentence of Rousseau,
that democracy is a government for gods, but unfit for man.
We have been able to touch on only a few of the topics that crowd Sir
Erskine May's volumes. Although he has perceived more clearly than
Tocqueville the contact of democracy with socialism, his judgment is
untinged with Tocqueville's despondency, and he contemplates the
direction of progress with a confidence that approaches optimism. The
notion of an inflexible logic in history does not depress him, for he
concerns himself with facts and with men more than with doctrines, and
his book is a history of several democracies, not of democracy. There
are links in the argument, there are phases of development which he
leaves unnoticed, because his object has not been to trace out the
properties and the connection of ideas, but to explain the results of
experience. We should consult his pages, probably, without effect, if we
wished to follow the origin and sequence of the democratic dogmas, that
all men are equal; that speech and thought are free; that each
generation is a law to itself only; that there shall be no endowments,
no entails, no primogeniture; that the people are sovereign; that the
people can do no wrong. The great mass of those who, of necessity, are
interested in practical politics have no such antiquarian curiosity.
They want to know what can be learned from the countries where the
democratic experiments have been tried; but they do not care to be told
how M. Waddington has emended the _Monumentum Ancyranum_, what
connection there was between Mariana and Milton, or between Penn and
Rousseau, or who invented the proverb _Vox Populi Vox Dei_. Sir Erskine
May's reluctance to deal with matters speculative and doctrinal, and to
devote his space to the mere literary history of politics, has made his
touch somewhat uncertain in treating of the political action of
Christianity, perhaps the most complex and comprehensive question that
can embarrass a historian. He disparages the influence of the mediaeval
Church on nations just emerging from a barbarous paganism, and he exalts
it when it had become associated with despotism and persecution. He
insists on the liberating action of the Reformation in the sixteenth
century, when it gave a stimulus to absolutism; and he is slow to
recognise, in the enthusiasm and violence of the sects in the
seventeenth, the most potent agency ever brought to bear on democratic
history. The omission of America creates a void between 1660 and 1789,
and leaves much unexplained in the revolutionary movement of the last
hundred years, which is the central problem of the book. But if some
things are missed from the design, if the execution is not equal in
every part, the praise remains to Sir Erskine May, that he is the only
writer who has ever brought together the materials for a comparative
study of democracy, that he has avoided the temper of party, that he has
shown a hearty sympathy for the progress and improvement of mankind, and
a steadfast faith in the wisdom and the power that guide it.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: _The Quarterly Review_, January 1878.]
IV
THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW[6]
The way in which Coligny and his adherents met their death has been
handed down by a crowd of trustworthy witnesses, and few things in
history are known in more exact detail. But the origin and motives of
the tragedy, and the manner of its reception by the opinion of Christian
Europe, are still subject to controversy. Some of the evidence has been
difficult of access, part is lost, and much has been deliberately
destroyed. No letters written from Paris at the time have been found in
the Austrian archives. In the correspondence of thirteen agents of the
House of Este at the Court of Rome, every paper relating to the event
has disappeared. All the documents of 1572, both from Rome and Paris,
are wanting in the archives of Venice. In the Registers of many French
towns the leaves which contained the records of August and September in
that year have been torn out. The first reports sent to England by
Walsingham and by the French Government have not been recovered. Three
accounts printed at Rome, when the facts were new, speedily became so
rare that they have been forgotten. The Bull of Gregory XIII. was not
admitted into the official collections; and the reply to Muretus has
escaped notice until now. The letters of Charles IX. to Rome, with the
important exception of that which he wrote on the 24th _of_ August, have
been dispersed and lost The letters of Gregory XIII. to France have
never been seen by persons willing to make them public. In the absence
of these documents the most authentic information is that which is
supplied by the French Ambassador and by the Nuncio. The despatches of
Ferralz, describing the attitude of the Roman court, are extant, but
have not been used. Those of Salviati have long been known.
Chateaubriand took a copy when the papal archives were at Paris, and
projected a work on the events with which they are concerned. Some
extracts were published, with his consent, by the continuator of
Mackintosh; and a larger selection, from the originals in the Vatican,
appeared in Theiner's _Annals of Gregory XIII_. The letters written
under Pius V. are beyond the limits of that work; and Theiner, moreover,
has omitted whatever seemed irrelevant to his purpose. The criterion of
relevancy is uncertain; and we shall avail ourselves largely of the
unpublished portions of Salviati's correspondence, which were
transcribed by Chateaubriand. These manuscripts, with others of equal
importance not previously consulted, determine several doubtful
questions of policy and design.
The Protestants never occupied a more triumphant position, and their
prospects were never brighter, than in the summer of 1572. For many
years the progress of their religion had been incessant. The most
valuable of the conquests it has retained were already made; and the
period of its reverses had not begun. The great division which aided
Catholicism afterwards to recover so much lost ground was not openly
confessed; and the effectual unity of the Reformed Churches was not yet
dissolved. In controversial theology the defence was weaker than the
attack. The works to which the Reformation owed its popularity and
system were in the hands of thousands, while the best authors of the
Catholic restoration had not begun to write. The press continued to
serve the new opinions better than the old; and in literature
Protestantism was supreme. Persecuted in the South, and established by
violence in the North, it had overcome the resistance of princes in
Central Europe, and had won toleration without ceasing to be intolerant.
In France and Poland, in the dominions of the Emperor and under the
German prelates, the attempt to arrest its advance by physical force had
been abandoned. In Germany it covered twice the area that remained to it
in the next generation, and, except in Bavaria, Catholicism was fast
dying out. The Polish Government had not strength to persecute, and
Poland became the refuge of the sects. When the bishops found that they
could not prevent toleration, they resolved that they would not restrict
it. Trusting to the maxim, "Bellum Haereticorum pax est Ecclesiae," they
insisted that liberty should extend to those whom the Reformers would
have exterminated.[7] The Polish Protestants, in spite of their
dissensions, formed themselves into one great party. When the death of
the last of the Jagellons, on the 7th of July 1572, made the monarchy
elective, they were strong enough to enforce their conditions on the
candidates; and it was thought that they would be able to decide the
election, and obtain a king of their own choosing. Alva's reign of
Terror had failed to pacify the Low Countries, and he was about to
resign the hopeless task to an incapable successor. The taking of the
Brill in April was the first of those maritime victories which led to
the independence of the Dutch. Mons fell in May; and in July the
important province of Holland declared for the Prince of Orange. The
Catholics believed that all was lost if Alva remained in command.[8]
The decisive struggle was in France. During the minority of Charles IX.
persecution had given way to civil war, and the Regent, his mother, had
vainly striven, by submitting to neither party, to uphold the authority
of the Crown. She checked the victorious Catholics, by granting to the
Huguenots terms which constituted them, in spite of continual disaster
in the field, a vast and organised power in the State. To escape their
influence it would have been necessary to invoke the help of Philip
II., and to accept protection which would have made France subordinate
to Spain. Philip laboured to establish such an alliance; and it was to
promote this scheme that he sent his queen, Elizabeth of Valois, to meet
her mother at Bayonne. In 1568 Elizabeth died; and a rumour came to
Catherine touching the manner of her death which made it hard to listen
to friendly overtures from her husband. Antonio Perez, at that time an
unscrupulous instrument of his master's will, afterwards accused him of
having poisoned his wife. "On parle fort sinistrement de sa mort, pour
avoir ete advancee," says Brantome. After the massacre of the
Protestants, the ambassador at Venice, a man distinguished as a jurist
and a statesman, reproached Catherine with having thrown France into the
hands of him in whom the world recognised her daughter's murderer.
Catherine did not deny the truth of the report. She replied that she was
"bound to think of her sons in preference to her daughters, that the
foul-play was not fully proved, and that if it were it could not be
avenged so long as France was weakened by religious discord."[9] She
wrote as she could not have written if she had been convinced that the
suspicion was unjust.
When Charles IX. began to be his own master he seemed resolved to follow
his father and grandfather in their hostility to the Spanish Power. He
wrote to a trusted servant that all his thoughts were bent on thwarting
Philip.[10] While the Christian navies were fighting at Lepanto, the
King of France was treating with the Turks. His menacing attitude in the
following year kept Don Juan in Sicilian waters, and made his victory
barren for Christendom. Encouraged by French protection, Venice withdrew
from the League. Even in Corsica there was a movement which men
interpreted as a prelude to the storm that France was raising against
the empire of Spain. Rome trembled in expectation of a Huguenot invasion
of Italy; for Charles was active in conciliating the Protestants both
abroad and at home. He married a daughter of the tolerant Emperor
Maximilian II.; and he carried on negotiations for the marriage of his
brother with Queen Elizabeth, not with any hope of success, but in order
to impress public opinion.[11] He made treaties of alliance, in quick
succession, with England, with the German Protestants, and with the
Prince of Orange. He determined that his brother Anjou, the champion of
the Catholics, of whom it was said that he had vowed to root out the
Protestants to a man,[12] should be banished to the throne of Poland.
Disregarding the threats and entreaties of the Pope, he gave his sister
in marriage to Navarre. By the peace of St. Germains the Huguenots had
secured, within certain limits, freedom from persecution and the liberty
of persecuting; so that Pius V. declared that France had been made the
slave of heretics. Coligny was now the most powerful man in the kingdom.
His scheme for closing the civil wars by an expedition for the conquest
of the Netherlands began to be put in motion. French auxiliaries
followed Lewis of Nassau into Mons; an army of Huguenots had already
gone to his assistance; another was being collected near the frontier,
and Coligny was preparing to take the command in a war which might
become a Protestant crusade, and which left the Catholics no hope of
victory. Meanwhile many hundreds of his officers followed him to Paris,
to attend the wedding which was to reconcile the factions, and cement
the peace of religion.
In the midst of those lofty designs and hopes, Coligny was struck down.
On the morning of the 22nd of August he was shot at and badly wounded.
Two days later he was killed; and a general attack was made on the
Huguenots of Paris. It lasted some weeks, and was imitated in about
twenty places. The chief provincial towns of France were among them.
Judged by its immediate result, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a
measure weakly planned and irresolutely executed, which deprived
Protestantism of its political leaders, and left it for a time to the
control of zealots. There is no evidence to make it probable that more
than seven thousand victims perished. Judged by later events, it was the
beginning of a vast change in the conflict of the churches. At first it
was believed that a hundred thousand Huguenots had fallen. It was said
that the survivors were abjuring by thousands,[13] that the children of
the slain were made Catholics, that those whom the priest had admitted
to absolution and communion were nevertheless put to death.[14] Men who
were far beyond the reach of the French Government lost their faith in a
religion which Providence had visited with so tremendous a judgment;[15]
and foreign princes took heart to employ severities which could excite
no horror after the scenes in France.
Contemporaries were persuaded that the Huguenots had been flattered and
their policy adopted only for their destruction, and that the murder of
Coligny and his followers was a long premeditated crime. Catholics and
Protestants vied with each other in detecting proofs of that which they
variously esteemed a sign of supernatural inspiration or of diabolical
depravity. In the last forty years a different opinion has prevailed. It
has been deemed more probable, more consistent with testimony and with
the position of affairs at the time, that Coligny succeeded in acquiring
extraordinary influence over the mind of Charles, that his advice really
predominated, and that the sanguinary resolution was suddenly embraced
by his adversaries as the last means of regaining power. This opinion is
made plausible by many facts. It is supported by several writers who
were then living, and by the document known as the Confession of Anjou.
The best authorities of the present day are nearly unanimous in
rejecting premeditation.
The evidence on the opposite side is stronger than they suppose. The
doom which awaited the Huguenots had been long expected and often
foretold. People at a distance, Monluc in Languedoc, and the Protestant
Mylius in Italy, drew the same inference from the news that came from
the court. Strangers meeting on the road discussed the infatuation of
the Admiral.[16] Letters brought from Rome to the Emperor the
significant intimation that the birds were all caged, and now was the
time to lay hands on them.[17] Duplessis-Mornay, the future chief of the
Huguenots, was so much oppressed with a sense of coming evil, that he
hardly ventured into the streets on the wedding-day. He warned the
Admiral of the general belief among their friends that the marriage
concealed a plot for their ruin, and that the festivities would end in
some horrible surprise.[18] Coligny was proof against suspicion. Several
of his followers left Paris, but he remained unmoved. At one moment the
excessive readiness to grant all his requests shook the confidence of
his son-in-law Teligny; but the doubt vanished so completely that
Teligny himself prevented the flight of his partisans after the attempt
on the Admiral's life. On the morning of the fatal day, Montgomery sent
word to Walsingham that Coligny was safe under protection of the King's
Guards, and that no further stir was to be apprehended.[19]
For many years foreign advisers had urged Catherine to make away with
these men. At first it was computed that half a dozen victims would be
enough.[20] That was the original estimate of Alva, at Bayonne.[21] When
the Duke of Ferrara was in France, in 1564, he proposed a larger
measure, and he repeated this advice by the mouth of every agent whom he
sent to France.[22] After the event, both Alva and Alfonso reminded
Catherine that she had done no more than follow their advice.[23] Alva's
letter explicitly confirms the popular notion which connects the
massacre with the conference of Bayonne; and it can no longer now be
doubted that La Roche-sur-Yon, on his deathbed, informed Coligny that
murderous resolutions had been taken on that occasion.[24] But the
Nuncio, Santa Croce, who was present, wrote to Cardinal Borromeo that
the Queen had indeed promised to punish the infraction of the Edict of
Pacification, but that this was a very different thing from undertaking
to extirpate heresy. Catherine affirmed that in this way the law could
reach all the Huguenot ministers; and Alva professed to believe her.[25]
Whatever studied ambiguity of language she may have used, the action of
1572 was uninfluenced by deliberations which were seven years old.
During the spring and summer the Tuscan agents diligently prepared their
master for what was to come. Petrucci wrote on the 19th of March that,
for a reason which he could not trust to paper, the marriage would
certainly take place, though not until the Huguenots had delivered up
their strongholds. Four weeks later Alamanni announced that the Queen's
pious design for restoring unity of faith would, by the grace of God, be
speedily accomplished. On the 9th of August Petrucci was able to report
that the plan arranged at Bayonne was near execution.[26] Yet he was not
fully initiated. The Queen afterwards assured him that she had confided
the secret to no foreign resident except the Nuncio,[27] and Petrucci
resentfully complains that she had also consulted the Ambassador of
Savoy. Venice, like Florence and Savoy, was not taken by surprise. In
February the ambassador Contarini explained to the Senate the specious
tranquillity in France, by saying that the Government reckoned on the
death of the Admiral or the Queen of Navarre to work a momentous
change.[28] Cavalli, his successor, judged that a business so grossly
mismanaged showed no signs of deliberation.[29] There was another
Venetian at Paris who was better informed. The Republic was seeking to
withdraw from the league against the Turks; and her most illustrious
statesman, Giovanni Michiel, was sent to solicit the help of France in
negotiating peace.[30] The account which he gave of his mission has been
pronounced by a consummate judge of Venetian State-Papers the most
valuable report of the sixteenth century.[31] He was admitted almost
daily to secret conference with Anjou, Nevers, and the group of Italians
on whom the chief odium rests; and there was no counsellor to whom
Catherine more willingly gave ear.[32] Michiel affirms that the
intention had been long entertained, and that the Nuncio had been
directed to reveal it privately to Pius V.[33]