PORTUGAL
Sec. 1. _The Rise and Fall of Portuguese Empire_
For European history Portugal is signalised in two aspects: first, as a
"made" kingdom, set up by the generating of local patriotism in a
medieval population not hereditarily different from that of the rest of
the Peninsula; secondly, as a small State which attained and for a time
wielded "empire" on a great scale. The beginnings of the local
patriotism are not confidently to be gathered from the old
chronicles,[942] which reduce the process for the most part to the
calculated action of the Queen Theresa (fl. 1114-28), certainly one of
the most interesting female figures in history. But the main process of
growth is simple enough. A series of warrior kings made good their
position on the one hand against Spain, and on the other conquered what
is now the southern part of Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) from the
Moors. Only in a limited degree did their administration realise the
gains conceivable from a differentiation and rivalry of cultures in the
Peninsula; but in view of the special need for such variation in a
territory open to few foreign culture-contacts, the Portuguese
nationality has counted substantially for civilisation. It would have
counted for much more if in the militant Catholic period the Portuguese
crown had not followed the evil lead of Spain in the three main steps of
setting up the Inquisition, expelling the Jews, and expelling the
Moriscoes.
On the Portuguese as on the northern European coasts, seafaring commerce
arose on a basis of fishing;[943] agriculturally, save as to fruits and
wines, Portugal was undeveloped; and the conquered Moorish territory,
handed over by the king in vast estates to feudal lords, who gave no
intelligent encouragement to cultivation, long remained sparsely
populated.[944] The great commercial expansion began soon after King
John II, egregiously known as "the Perfect," suddenly and violently
broke the power of the feudal nobility (1483-84), a blow which made the
king instantly a popular favourite, and which their feudal methods had
left the nobles unable to return. In the previous generation Prince
Henry the Navigator had set up a great movement of maritime discovery,
directed to commercial ends; and from this beginning arose the
remarkable but short-lived empire of Portugal in the Indies. That stands
out from the later episodes of the Dutch and British empires in that, to
begin with, the movement of discovery was systematically fostered and
subsidised by the crown, Prince Henry giving the lead; and that in the
sequel the whole commercial fruits of the process were the crown's
monopoly--a state of things as unfavourable to permanence as could well
be conceived. But even under more favourable conditions, though the
Portuguese empire might have overborne the Dutch, it could hardly have
maintained itself against the British. The economic and military bases,
as in the case of Holland, were relatively too narrow for the
superstructure.
What is most memorable in the Portuguese evolution is the simple process
of discovery, which was scientifically and systematically conducted in
the hope of sailing round Africa to India. The list of results is worth
detailing. In 1419 Perestrello discovered the island of Porto Santa; in
1420 Zarco and Vaz found Madeira, not before charted; and in the next
twenty years the Canary Islands, the Azores, Santa Maria, and St. Miguel
swelled the list. In 1434 Cape Bojador was doubled by Gil Eannes, and
the Rio d'Ouro was reached in 1436 by Baldaya; in 1441 Nuno Tristan
attained Cape Blanco; in 1445 he found the river Senegal; D. Dias
reaching Guinea in the same year, and Cape Verde in 1446. From Tristan's
voyage of 1441 dates the slave trade, which now gave a sinister stimulus
to the process of discovery; every cargo of negroes being eagerly bought
for the cheap cultivation of the Moorish lands, still poorly populated
under the feudal regimen.[945] The commercial and slave-trading purpose
may in part account for the piecemeal nature of the advance;[946] for it
was not till 1471 that the islands of Fernando Po were discovered and
the Equator crossed; and not till 1484 that Cam reached the Congo.[947]
But two years later Bartholomew Dias made the rest of the way to the
Cape of Good Hope, a much greater advance than had before been made in
thirty years; and after a pause in the chronicles of eleven years, Vasco
da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Calcutta. Meantime the Perfect king,
preoccupied with the African route, made in 1488 his great mistake of
finally dismissing Columbus from his court as a visionary. Had Portugal
added the new hemisphere to her list of discoveries, it would have been
stupendous indeed. As it is, this "Celtic" people, sailing in poor
little vessels obviously not far developed from the primary
fishing-smack, had done more for the navigation and charting of the
world than all the rest of Europe besides.
And still the expansion went rapidly on; the reign of Manuel, "the
Fortunate," reaping even more glory than that of his predecessor, who in
turn had rewards denied to the pioneer promoter, Prince Henry. In the
year 1500 Brazil was reached by Cabral, and Labrador by Corte-Real; and
in 1501 Castella discovered the islands of St. Helena and Ascension.
Amerigo Vespucci, whose name came into the heritage of the discovery of
Columbus, explored the Rio Plata and Paraguay in 1501-3; Coutinho did as
much for Madagascar and the Mauritius in 1506; Almeida in 1507 found the
Maldive Islands; Malacca and Sumatra were attached by Sequiera in 1509;
the Moluccas by Serrano in 1512; and the Ile de Bourbon in 1513 by
Mascarenhas. In eastern Asia, again, Coelho in 1516 sailed up the coast
of Cochin China and explored Siam; Andrade reached Canton in 1517 and
Pekin in 1521; and in 1520 the invincible Magellan, entering the service
of Spain,[948] achieved his great passage to the Pacific.[949] No such
century of navigation had yet been seen; and all this dazzling
enlargement of life and knowledge was being accomplished by one of the
smallest of the European kingdoms, while England was laggardly passing
from the point of Agincourt, by the way of the Wars of the Roses, to
that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, producing at that stage, indeed,
More's _Utopia_, but yielding no fruits meet therefor.
When, however, there followed on the process of discovery the process of
commerce, the advantages accruing to the monarchic impulse and control
were absent. Always as rigidly restrictive in its pursuit of discovery
and commerce as the ancient Carthaginians had been,[950] the Portuguese
crown was as much more restrictive than they in its practice as an
absolute monarchy is more concentrated than an oligarchy. Whatever
progress was achieved by the Portuguese in India was in the way of
vigorous conquest and administration by capable governors like
Albuquerque (_d._ 1515) and Da Castro (_d._ 1548), of whom the first
showed not only military but conciliatory capacity, and planned what
might have been a triumphant policy of playing off Hindu princes against
Mohammedan. But the restrictive home-policy was fatal to successful
empire-building where the conditions called for the most constant output
of energy. Though the Portuguese race has shown greater viability in
India than either the Dutch or the English, it could not but suffer
heavily from the climate in the first days of adaptation. The death-rate
among the early governors is startling; and the rank and file cannot
have fared much better.[951] All the while swarms of the more
industrious Portuguese, including many Jews, were passing to Brazil and
settling there.[952] To meet this drain there was needed the freest
opening in India to private enterprise; whereas the Portuguese crown,
keeping in its own hands the whole of the Indian products extorted by
its governors, and forcing them to send cargoes of gratis goods for the
Crown to sell, limited enterprise in an unparalleled fashion.[953] The
original work of discovery and factory-planting, indeed, could not have
been accomplished by Portuguese private enterprise as then developed;
but the monarchic monopoly prevented its growth. The Jews had been
expelled (1496), and with them most of the acquired commercial skill of
the nation;[954] the nobles had become as subservient to and dependent
on the throne as those of Spain were later to be; and already the curse
of empire was impoverishing the land as it was to do in Spain. As was
fully realised in the eighteenth century by the great Pombal,[955] the
mere possession of gold mines destroyed prosperity, the imaginary wealth
driving out the real; but before Portugal was ruined by her Brazilian
mines she was enfeebled by the social diseases that afflicted ancient
Rome. Slave labour in the Moorish provinces drove out free; the rural
population elsewhere thinned rapidly under the increasing drain of the
expeditions of discovery, colonisation, and conquest; and only in the
rapidly increasing population of Lisbon, which trebled in eighty years,
was there any ostensible advance in wealth to show for the era of
empire. Even in Lisbon, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the
negro slaves outnumbered the free citizens.[956] And over these
conditions of economic and political decadence reigned the Inquisition.
In Portugal, as in Spain, the period of incipient political decay is the
period of brilliant literature; the explanation being that in both cases
middle-class and upper-class incomes were still large and the volume of
trade great, there being thus an economic demand for the arts, while the
administration was becoming inept and the empire weakening. In both
cases, too, there was less waste of energy in war than in the ages
preceding. As Lope de Vega and Calderon build up a brilliant drama after
the Armada and the loss of half the Netherlands, and Velasquez is
sustained by Philip IV, so Camoens writes his epic, Gil Vicente his
plays, and Barros his history, in the reign of John III, when Portugal
is within a generation of being annexed to Spain, and within two
generations of being bereft of her Asiatic empire by the Dutch. At such
a stage, when wealth still abounds, and men for lack of science are
indifferent to such phenomena as multiplication of slaves and rural
depopulation, a large city public can evoke and welcome literature and
art. It was so in Augustan Rome. And the sequel is congruous in all
cases.
Mr. Morse Stephens in this connection affirms (_Portugal_, p. 259)
that "it has always been the case in the history of a nation which
can boast of a golden age, that the epoch of its greatest glory is
that in which its literature chiefly flourished.... It was so with
Portugal. The age which witnessed the careers of its famous
captains and conquerors was also the age of its greatest poets and
prose writers." The proposition on inquiry will be found to be
inaccurate in its terms and fallacious in its implications. As
thus: (1) Greek literature is, on the whole, at its highest in the
period of Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Aristotle; while the
period of "glory" or expansion must be placed either earlier or
later, under Alexander, when the golden age of literature is past.
(2) The synchronism equally breaks down in the case of Rome. There
is little literature in the period of the triumph over Cartilage;
and literature does not go on growing after Augustus, despite
continued military "glory." Trajan had neither a Horace nor a
Virgil. (3) In England the "glory" of Marlborough's victories
evokes Addison, not Shakespeare, who does most of his greatest work
under James I. And though Chaucer chanced to flourish under Edward
III, there is no fine literature whatever alongside of the
conquests of Henry V. (4) In Germany, Schiller and Goethe, Fichte
and Hegel, wrote in a period of political subordination, and Heine
before the period of Bismarckism. Who are the great writers since?
(5) In France, the period of Napoleon is nearly blank of great
writers. They abounded after the fall of his empire and the loss of
his conquests. (6) The great literary period of Spain begins with
the decline of the Spanish empire. (7) The great modern literature
of the Scandinavian States has arisen without any national "glory"
to herald it.
It is hardly necessary to bring further evidence. It remains only
to point out that in Portugal itself the brilliant literary reign
is not the period of discovery, since all the great exploration had
been done before John III came to the throne. It is true that the
retrospect of an age of conquest and effort _may_ stimulate
literature in a later generation; but the true causation is in a
literary _plus_ a social sequence, though the _arrest_ of literary
development is always caused socially and politically. Portuguese
and Spanish literature and drama alike derive proximately from the
Italian Renaissance. When both polities were in full decadence,
with the Inquisition hung round their necks, their intellectual
life necessarily drooped. But it is pure fallacy to suppose--and
here Mr. Stephens would perhaps acquiesce--that a period of new
conquest is _needed_ to elicit new and original literature. Homer,
Plato, Dante, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bacon, Moliere,
Voltaire, Goethe, Leopardi, Poe, Balzac, Heine, Flaubert,
Hawthorne, Tourguenief, Ruskin, Ibsen--these are in no rational
sense by-products of militarism or "expansion." Given the right
social and economic conditions, Spain and Portugal may in the
twentieth century produce greater literature than they ever had,
without owning a particle of foreign empire any more than do Sweden
and Norway.
The causes of the decline of the Portuguese empire are very apparent. At
the best, with its narrow economic basis in home production, it would
have had a hard struggle to beat off the attack of the Dutch and
English; but the royal policy, reducing all Portuguese life to
dependence on the throne, had withered the national energies before the
Dutch attack was made. Hence the easy fall of the crown to Philip of
Spain when, the succession failing, he chose to grasp it (1581): the
nation had for the time lost the power of self-determination; and under
the Spanish dominion the Portuguese possessions in the Indies were
defended against the Dutch and English with but a moiety even of the
energy that a Portuguese king might have elicited. So the imposing
beginnings came well-nigh to naught, the Portuguese empire lasting in
its entirety, as a trade monopoly, for just a hundred years. Within the
first thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century Dutch and
English, Moslems, and even Danes, had captured from Spain-ruled Portugal
the Moluccas, Java, most of its Indian territory, its Persian and
Chinese settlements, and much of the coast of Brazil; and the two
former enemies harried at sea what Oriental trade it had kept. The rest
of the Indian settlements were lost in the next generation. "Empire" had
run for Portugal the usual course.
It was at this stage that the new life of the nation began. In 1640 came
the successful revolt against Spain; and the Dutch power in Brazil,
which had seemed decisively established under Prince Maurice of Nassau,
was entirely overthrown within ten years after his recall in 1644. In
Portugal the revolution was primarily the work of the nobility,
exasperated by Spanish arrogance and exclusiveness; but they were
effectually supported by the people for the same reason; and the state
of Spain, financially decrepit and embroiled in war abroad and rebellion
in Catalonia, left the new dynasty of Braganza able to maintain itself,
with French help, against the clerical and other elements of pro-Spanish
reaction. The overthrow of the Dutch in Brazil was almost against the
new king's will, for they had at first supported him against Spain; but
the movement there was as spontaneous, and fully as well justified, as
the revolt at home against Spain itself.
Sec. 2. _The Colonisation of Brazil_
Brazil was and is in fact for Portugal the analogue to the North
American colonies of Britain. Where "empire" was sought in the Indies as
a means of revenue, savage Brazil, after the gold-seeking rush of 1530
which first raised it above the status of a penal settlement, was a
colony, resorted to by men--many of them Jews--seeking freedom from the
Inquisition, and men driven from the soil by slave-labour seeking land
to till for their own subsistence.[957] All things considered, it has
been one of the soundest processes of colonisation in history. The low
state of the autochthonous inhabitants is sufficient proof of Buckle's
proposition that there the combination of great heat and great moisture
made impossible a successful primary civilisation, nature being too
unmanageable for the natural or primitive man.[958] The much higher
development of pre-European civilisation not only in Mexico and Peru but
among the North American Indians[959] can be explained in no other way.
But that science may not in time so exploit the natural forces as to
turn them to the account of a high tertiary civilisation is an
assumption we are not entitled to make, though Buckle apparently
inclined to it. When he wrote, the population of Brazil was computed at
six millions. To-day it stands at over twenty-three millions;[960] and
in Brazil the prospect has never been reckoned otherwise than hopeful.
The progress all along, relatively to the obstacles, has been so great
that there is no visible ground for anticipating any arrest in the near
future.
In Brazil, from the first, individual and collective energy had the
chance that the royal monopoly denied to the Asiatic settlements. There
was here no exigible revenue to arrange for; and the first colonists,
being left to themselves, set up local self-government with elected
military magistrates called captains[961]--an evolution more remarkable
than any which took place in the first century of English colonisation
in North America. The first governor-general sent out, Alfonso de Sousa,
had the wisdom to preserve and develop the system of captaincies;[962]
and colonisation went steadily on throughout the century. It was first
sought, as a matter of course, to enslave the natives; but the attempt
led only to a race-war such as grew up later in the New England
colonies; and in the Catholic as later in the Protestant colonies resort
was had to the importation of negroes, already so common as slaves in
Portugal. With a much slower rate of progress, the Brazilians have in
the end come much better than the North Americans out of the social
diseases thus set up.
In the first place, the Jesuits had a missionary success among the
aborigines such as the Puritans never approached in North America, thus
eventually arresting the race-struggle and securing the native stock as
an element of population--a matter of obvious importance, in view of the
factor of climate. And whereas the labours of the Jesuits in India had
been turned to naught by the Inquisition which they brought in their
train, Brazil was by the wisdom of the early governors saved from that
scourge.[963] Thus fortunately restrained by the civil power, the
Jesuits did a large part of the work of civilising Brazil. So long as
the stage of race-war lasted--and till far on in the seventeenth century
it was chronic and murderous[964]--they strove to protect the natives
whom they converted.[965] It is noteworthy, too, that just before
expelling the Jesuit order from Portugal in 1759, by which time it had
become a wealthy and self-seeking trading corporation in Brazil,[966]
the Marquis of Pombal secured the emancipation in Brazil[967] of all the
Indians who had there been enslaved as a result of the old race-wars,
thus giving effect to a law which the Jesuits had got passed in 1680
without being able to enforce it against the slave-owners.[968] And it
is apparently due in part to the culture they maintained[969] that,
though the emancipation of the negroes was to be delayed till late in
the nineteenth century, an energetic plea was made for them by a
Portuguese advocate of Batria at the time of the emancipation of the
Indians.[970] Their own degeneration into a wealth-amassing corporation
was an exact economic duplication of the process that had occurred in
Europe among all the monastic and chivalrous orders of the Middle Ages
in succession.[971]
In the eighteenth century Brazil, still limited, for its direct trade,
to Portugal, so prospered that the loss of empire in Asia was much more
than compensated even to the royal revenue of Portugal; the new
discoveries of gold bringing for a time as much as L300,000 a year to
the treasury under the system by which, the goldfields remaining free to
their exploiters, the crown received a fifth of the total export.[972]
The trouble was that the influx of gold in Portugal, as in Spain,
paralysed industry; and the country became poorer in a double ratio to
its bullion revenue;[973] and not till this was scientifically realised
could a sound polity be raised. But in Portugal itself, after the advent
of the anti-clerical Marquis of Pombal, there went on as striking a
regeneration of government (1750-77) as occurred in Spain under Charles
III; and though the storms of the French Revolution, and the tyrannous
reactions which followed it, fell as heavily on Portugal as on the rest
of the peninsula, its lot is to-day hopeful enough. In common with those
of Spain and Italy, its literature shows plenty of fresh intellectual
life; and, again as in their case, its worst trouble is a heritage of
bad finance, rather than any lack of progressive intelligence. With
sound government, the large outlet offered by Brazil to emigration
should make Portugal a place of plenty--if, that is, its burden of debt
be not too great. But herein lies a problem of special importance for
the people of Great Britain. Portugal, like Britain, began to accumulate
a national debt in the period of chronic European war; but between 1850
and 1890 the sum had actually multiplied tenfold, rising from
twenty-five to two hundred and fifty-eight millions of milreis; and at
the close of 1910 it stood at over one thousand millions, the interest
upon which constitutes two-fifths of the total national expenditure. All
the while, the balance of productivity is more and more heavily on the
side of Brazil. As a similar evolution may conceivably take place within
the next century or two in England, it will be of peculiar interest to
note how Portugal handles the problem. When the English coal supply is
exhausted, a vast debt, it is to be feared, may be left to a population
ill-capable of sustaining it; and the apparently inevitable result will
be such a drift of population from Britain to America or Australia as
now goes from Portugal to Brazil, leaving the home population all the
less able to bear its financial burden. It is difficult to see how any
arrangement, save a composition with creditors, can meet the Portuguese
case.[974] Yet within the last twenty years Lisbon has been enormously
improved; and if but the law of 1844 prescribing compulsory education
could be enforced, Portuguese resources might be so developed as to
solve the problem progressively. As it is, the nation is still largely
illiterate--a heavy handicap.
Meanwhile Brazil, after passing from the status of colony to that of
kingdom or so-called "empire," has become a republic, like the other
Iberian States of South America; and throughout the nineteenth century
its development has been comparatively fortunate. The flight of the
Portuguese king[975] thither in 1808 gave it independent standing
without its paying the price of war; whence came free trade with the
friendly States of Europe; and when on the return of the king it
insisted on maintaining its independence under his son, against the
jealous effort of the Portuguese Cortes to reduce it to a group of
dependent provinces,[976] the tradition of freedom set up by its past
prevailed. Thus the Brazilians effected peacefully what the English
colonies in North America achieved only by an embittering and exhausting
war; and so far as those of us can judge who are not at home in
Portuguese literature, the culture evolution in Brazil at the date of
the French Revolution had on some lines equalled that of the United
States.[977] But where the United States were in educative and enriching
contact with the relatively high civilisations of England and France,
Brazil could still draw only on the relatively small intellectual and
commercial stores of Portugal, with some addition from general commerce
with Europe. It was in the latter half of the century, when intellectual
influences from France had been prevalent, that Brazilian possibilities
began to emphasise themselves.
North American evolution has in the nineteenth century been especially
rapid because of several great economic factors: (1) the tobacco and
cotton culture of the period before the civil war; (2) the very large
immigration from Europe; (3) the rush for gold to California, hastening
the development of the West; (4) the abundant yield of coal and iron,
quickening every species of manufacture, especially after (5) a large
influx of cheap European labour in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. No one of these special factors has been potent in Brazil, save
for the latterly rapid increase of immigration; there is no great staple
of produce that thus far outgoes competition, unless it be caoutchouc;
the precious metals are not now abundant; and there is practically no
coal, though there is infinite iron. But these are conditions merely of
a relatively slow development, not of unprogressiveness; and the
presumption is that they will prove beneficent. The rapid commercial
development of the United States is excessively capitalistic, in virtue
largely of the factor of coal, and the consequent disproportionate
stress of manufactures. The outstanding result is a hard-driven
competitive life for the mass of the population, with the prospect ahead
of industrial convulsions, in addition to the nightmare of the
race-hatred between black and white--a desperate problem, from which
Brazil seems to have been saved. There the problem of slavery was later
faced than in the United States, partly, perhaps, because there the
slave was less cruelly treated; but the result of the delay was
altogether good. There was no civil war; the process of emancipation was
gradual, beginning in 1871 and finishing with a leap in 1885-88; and no
race-hatred has been left behind.[978] Those whose political philosophy
begins and ends with a belief in the capacities of the "Anglo-Saxon
race" would do well to note these facts.
In Brazil the process of emancipation, long favoured as elsewhere by the
liberal minds,[979] was peacefully forced on by economic pressure. It
was seen that slave labour was a constant check to the immigration of
free labour, and therefore to the development of the country.[980] When
this had become clear, emancipation was only a question of time. The
same development would inevitably have come about in North America; and
it is not a proof of any special "Anglo-Saxon" faculty for government
that the process there was precipitated by one of the bloodiest wars of
the modern world, and has left behind it one of the blackest problems by
which any civilisation is faced. The frequent European comments on the
revolutions of South America are apt to set up an illusion. All told,
those crises represent perhaps less evil than was involved in the North
American Civil War; and they are hardly greater moral evils than the
peaceful growth of financial corruption in the North. In any case, the
only revolution in Brazil since the outbreak of 1848 has been the no
less peaceful than remarkable episode of 1889, which dethroned the
Emperor Pedro II and made Brazil a republic. There was as much of pathos
as of promise in the event, for Pedro had been one of the very best
monarchs of the century; but at least the bloodless change was in
keeping with his reign and his benign example,[981] and may indeed be
reckoned a due result of them.
In fine, Brazil--in common with other parts of South America--has a fair
chance of being one day the scene of a civilisation morally and socially
higher than that now evolving in North America. What may be termed the
coal-civilisations, with their factitious rapidity of exploitation, are
in the nature of the case relatively ugly and impermanent. That cannot
well be the highest civilisation which multiplies by the myriad its
serfs of the mine, and by the million its slaves of the machine. In
South America the lack of coal promises escape from the worst
developments of capitalism,[982] inasmuch as labour there must be mainly
spent on and served by the living processes and forces of nature, there
so immeasurable and so inexhaustible of beauty. Fuel enough for sane
industry is supplied by the richest woods on the planet; and the
Brazilian climate, even now singularly wholesome over immense
areas,[983] may become still more generally so by control of vegetation.
It is a suggestive fact that there the common bent, though still far
short of mastery, is in an exceptional degree towards the high arts of
form and sound.[984] It may take centuries to evoke from a population
which quietly embraces the coloured types of South America and Africa
the aesthetic progress of which it is capable;[985] but the very fact
that these types play their physical and artistic part in the growth is
a promise special to the case. And if thus the "Latin" races--for it is
Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and French-speaking Belgians who
chiefly make up the immigrants, though there is a German element
also--build up a humanly catholic and soundly democratic life in that
part of the planet most prodigally served by nature, subduing to their
need the vast living forces which overpowered the primitive man, and at
the same time escaping the sinister gift of subterranean fuel--if thus
they build up life rather than dead wealth, they will have furthered
incomparably the general deed of man. But it is part of the hope set up
by the slower rate of a progress which overtakes and keeps pace with
nature, instead of forestalling the yearly service of the sun, that when
it reaches greatness it will have outlived the instincts of racial pride
and hate which have been the shame and the stumbling-block of the
preceding ages. Should "little" Portugal be the root of such a growth,
her part will surely have been sufficient. But in the meantime Portugal
and Brazil alike suffer from illiteracy, the bane of the Catholic
countries;[986] and that priest-wrought evil must be remedied if their
higher life is to be maintained.
Until this vital drawback is removed the possible social gain to
Portugal from the revolution of 1910 cannot be realised. A republic is
more favourable to progress than a monarchy only in so far as it gives
freer play and fuller furtherance to all forms of energy; and in the
still priest-ridden Peninsula the resistance of sacerdotalism to
democratic rule is a great stumbling-block. The Republic of Portugal
needs time to establish itself aright. Citizens of more "advanced"
countries are wont to criticise with asperity shortcomings of
administration in the "new" States of our time which were fully
paralleled in their own in the past. Englishmen who make comparisons
between their own political system and that of countries whose
constitutions have been reshaped within the present century would do
well to consider the state of English government in the latter part of
the eighteenth century, after a hundred years of constitutional freedom.
Nay, in a country where the great parties in our own time perpetually
accuse each other of gross and unscrupulous misgovernment,
disparagements of the politics of countries which only recently attained
self-government are obviously open to discount. Suffice it that
Portugal, albeit by a _via dolorosa_ of violence trodden by other
peoples before her, has reaffirmed her part in the movement of
civilisation towards a larger and a better life, thus giving the
hundredth disproof to the formulas which deny the potentiality of
advance to States which have known decadence.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 942: _The Story of Portugal_, by Mr. H. Morse Stephens, 1891,
is the most trustworthy history of Portugal in English, giving as it
does the main results of the work of the modern scientific school of
Portuguese historians.]
[Footnote 943: Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik_, 1881, p. 283.]
[Footnote 944: H. Morse Stephens, _Portugal_, 1891, pp. 53, 87, 102,
236.]
[Footnote 945: Stephens, _Portugal_, pp. 148, 149, 182.]
[Footnote 946: Many of the dates are to some extent in dispute. Cp.
Stephens, _Portugal_, pp. 144-56; and Mr. Major's Life of _Prince Henry
of Portugal_, 1868, _passim_.]
[Footnote 947: There is a dubious-looking record that at this time a
systematic attempt was made to Christianise the natives instead of
enslaving them. See it in Dunham, _History of Spain and Portugal_, iii,
288-91.]
[Footnote 948: Thus the second great expansion of geographical
knowledge, like the first, went to the credit of Spain through
Portuguese mismanagement, Magellan being alienated by King Miguel's
impolicy.]
[Footnote 949: I follow the dates fixed by Mr. Stephens, p. 175.]
[Footnote 950: See Dunham, iii, 286, as to the anger of John II at a
pilot's remark that the voyage to Guinea was easily made. An attempted
disclosure of the fact to Spain was ferociously punished.]
[Footnote 951: Cp. Stephens, pp. 181, 218.]
[Footnote 952: _Id._ p. 228.]
[Footnote 953: Stephens, pp. 177, 181, 192.]
[Footnote 954: _Id._ pp. 171-73.]
[Footnote 955: Conde da Carnota, _The Marquis of Pombal_, 2nd. ed. 1871,
pp. 72-77.]
[Footnote 956: Stephens, p. 182.]
[Footnote 957: Stephens, pp. 227, 228.]
[Footnote 958: _Introduction_, 3-vol. ed. i, 103-108; 1-vol. ed. pp.
60-61. The formula of heat and moisture, however, applies only
generally. One of the climatic troubles of the great province of Ceara
in particular is that at times there is no wet season, and now and then
even a drought of whole years. See ch. iii, _Climatologie_, by Henri
Morize, in the compilation _Bresil en 1889_, pp. 41, 42.]
[Footnote 959: Cp. the extremely interesting treatises of Mr. Lucien
Carr, _The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley_ (Washington, 1893), _The
Position of Women among the Huron-Iroquois Tribes_ (Salem, 1884), and on
the _Food and Ornaments of Certain American Indians _(Worcester, Mass.,
1895-97).]
[Footnote 960: Increase of eight millions since 1890.]
[Footnote 961: Stephens, p. 225.]
[Footnote 962: Mr. Stephens (p. 226) states that there were created
three vast "chief captaincies." Baron de Rio-Branco, in his _Esquisse de
l'histoire du Bresil_, in the compilation _Bresil en 1889_, specifies a
division by the king (1532-35) into twelve hereditary captaincies. Both
statements seem true. The policy of non-interference was wisely adhered
to by later governors, though Thomas de Sousa (_circa_ 1550) introduced
a necessary measure of centralisation.]
[Footnote 963: Stephens, pp. 231, 232.]
[Footnote 964: Baron de Rio-Branco, _Esquisse_, as cited, pp. 127-32.]
[Footnote 965: _Id._ p. 149; Stephens, p. 231.]
[Footnote 966: Stephens, p. 359.]
[Footnote 967: By decree of June, 1755. Conde da Carnota, _The Marquis
of Pombal_, as cited, p. 40.]
[Footnote 968: Rio-Branco, p. 132.]
[Footnote 969: As to which see Rio-Branco, p. 149.]
[Footnote 970: _Id._ p. 148.]
[Footnote 971: As to this see the author's _Dynamics of Religion_, pp.
24-27; and _Short History of Freethought_, 2nd ed. i, 375 _sq._]
[Footnote 972: Stephens, pp. 348, 376.]
[Footnote 973: This is very trenchantly set forth in one of the writings
of the Marquis of Pombal, given by Carnota in his memoir, pp. 75-77.
Pombal was on this head evidently a disciple of the French physiocrats,
or of Montesquieu, who lucidly embodies their doctrines on money
(_Esprit des Lois_, 1748, xxi, 22; xxii, 1 _sq._). On the general
question of the impoverishment of Portugal by her American gold and
silver mines, cp. Carnota pp. 4, 72-73, 207.]
[Footnote 974: This has been repeatedly suggested. See the pamphlet of
Guilherme J.C. Henriquez (W.J. C. Henry) on _Portugal_, 1880.]
[Footnote 975: This had been several times proposed in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries (Rio-Branco, p. 154).]
[Footnote 976: Rio-Branco, p. 163.]
[Footnote 977: Cp. Rio-Branco, _Esquisse_, as cited, p. 151.]
[Footnote 978: F.J. de Santa-Anna Nery, "Travail servile et travail
libre," in vol. _Bresil en 1889_, pp. 205, 206; E. da Silva-Prado,
"Immigration," ch. xvi of same compilation, pp. 489, 490.]
[Footnote 979: Rio-Branco, p. 186, _note_.]
[Footnote 980: From 1857 to 1871, the fifteen years preceding the
process of emancipation, the total immigration was only 170,000. From
1873 to 1887 it amounted to 400,000, and it has since much increased.
Cp. Santa-Anna Nery, as cited, p. 212; and E. da Silva-Prado,
"Immigration" as cited, pp. 489-91.]
[Footnote 981: It is interesting to note that whereas he was, for a
king, an accomplished and enlightened philosopher, of the theistic
school of Coleridge, the revolutionist movement was made by the
Brazilian school of Positivists. It would be hard to find a revolution
in which both sides stood at so high an intellectual level.]
[Footnote 982: See, in _Bresil en 1889_, the remarks of M. da
Silva-Prado, p. 559.]
[Footnote 983: See the section (ch. iii) on "Climatologie," by Henri
Morize, in _Bresil en 1889_; in particular the section on "Immigration"
(ch. xvi) by E. da Silva-Prado, pp. 503-505.]
[Footnote 984: See, in the same volume, the section (ch. xviii) on
"L'Art," by da Silva-Prado. He shows that "Le Bresilien a la
preoccupation de la beaute" (p. 556).]
[Footnote 985: The probabilities appear to be specially in favour of
music, to which the native races and the negroes alike show a great
predilection (_id._ pp. 545, 546). As M. da Silva-Prado urges, what is
needed is a systematic home-instruction, as liberally carried out as was
Pedro's policy of sending promising students of the arts to Europe. Thus
far, though education is good, books have been relatively scarce because
of their dearness. Here again the United States had an immense
preliminary advantage in their ability to reproduce at low prices the
works of English authors, paying nothing to the writers; a state of
things which subsisted long after the States had produced great writers
of their own.]
[Footnote 986: In Portugal, "by a law enacted in 1844, primary education
is compulsory; but only a small fraction of the children of the lower
classes really attend school" (_Statesman's Year-Book_). In Brazil there
has been great educational progress in recent years; and in 1911 a
decree was issued for the reform of the school system, a Board of
Education being established with control over all the schools. Education
is still non-compulsory.]
PART VI
ENGLISH HISTORY DOWN TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD
CHAPTER I
BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION
It is after the great Civil War that English political development
becomes most directly instructive, because it is thenceforward that the
modern political conditions begin to be directly traceable.
Constitutional or parliamentary monarchy takes at that point a virtually
new departure. But we shall be better prepared to follow the play of the
forces of attraction and repulsion, union and strife, in the modern
period, if we first realise how in the ages of feudal monarchy and
personal monarchy, as the previous periods have been conveniently named,
the same fundamental forces were at work in different channels. The
further we follow these forces back the better we are prepared to
conceive political movement in terms of naturalist as opposed to
verbalist formulas. Above all things, we must get rid of the habit of
explaining each phenomenon in terms of the abstraction of itself--as
Puritanism by "the Puritan spirit," Christian civilisation by
"Christianity," and English history by "the English character." We are
to look for the causation of the Puritan spirit and English conduct and
the religion of the hour in the interplay of general instincts and
particular circumstances.
Sec. 1
At the very outset, the conventional views as to the bias of the
"Anglo-Saxon race"[987] are seen on the least scrutiny to be excluded by
the facts. Credited with an innate bent to seafaring, the early English
are found to have virtually abandoned the sea after settling in
England;[988] the new conditions altering the sea-going bent just as the
older had made it, and continued to do in the case of the Scandinavians.
Credited in the same fashion with a racial bias to commerce, they are
found to have been uncommercial, unadventurous, home-staying; and it
took centuries of continental influences to make them otherwise. Up to
the fourteenth century "almost the whole of English trade was in the
hands of aliens."[989] And of what trade the "free" Anglo-Saxons did
conduct, the most important branch seems to have been the slave
trade.[990] As to the mass of the population, whatever were their actual
life-conditions--and as to this we have very little knowledge--they were
certainly not the "free barbarians" of the old Teutonic legend. Unfree
in some sense they mostly were; and all that we have seen of the early
evolution of Greece and Rome goes to suggest that their status was
essentially depressed. In the words of a close student, English economic
history "begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population
under Saxon rule--a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years of
English economic evolution to set them free."[991] This is perhaps an
over-statement: serfdom suggests general predial slavery; and this
cannot be shown to have existed. But those who repel the proposition
seem to take no account of the _tendency_ towards popular depression in
early settled communities.[992] If we stand by the terminology of
Domesday Book, we are far indeed from the conception of a population of
freemen.
That the mass of the "Saxon" English (who included many of
non-Saxon descent) were more or less "unfree" is a conclusion
repeatedly reached on different lines of research. Long ago, the
popular historian Sharon Turner wrote that "There can be no doubt
that nearly three-fourths of the Anglo-Saxon population were in a
state of slavery" (_History of the Anglo-Saxons_, 4th ed. 1823,
iii, 255); and he is here supported by his adversary Dunham
(_Europe during the Middle Ages_, Cab. Cyc. 1834, iii, 49-52).
J.M. Kemble later admitted that the "whole population in some
districts were unfree" (_The Saxons in England_, reprint, 1876, i,
189). Yet another careful student sums up that "at the time of the
Conquest we find the larger portion of the inhabitants of England
in a state of villenage" (J.F. Morgan, _England under the Normans_,
1858, p. 61). (The interesting question of the racial elements of
the population at and after the Conquest is fully discussed by the
Rev. Geoffrey Hill, _Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest_,
1904, ch. i.)
Later and closer research does but indicate gradations in the
status of the unfree--gradations which seem to have varied
arbitrarily in terms of local law. (On this, however, see Morgan,
p. 62.) The Domesday Book specifies multitudes of _villani_,
_servi_, _bordarii_ (or _cotarii_), as well as (occasionally) large
numbers of _sochmanni_, and _liberi homines_. In Cornwall there
were only six chief proprietors, with 1,738 _villani_, 2,441
_bordarii_, and 1,148 _servi_; in Devonshire, 8,246 _villani_,
4,814 _bordarii_, and 3,210 _servi_; in Gloucestershire, 3,071
_villani_, 1,701 _bordarii_, and 2,423 _servi_; while in
Lincolnshire there were 11,322 _sochmanni_, 7,168 _villani_, 3,737
_bordarii_; and in Norfolk 4,528 _villani_, 8,679 _bordarii_, 1,066
_servi_, 5,521 _sochmanni_, and 4,981 _liberi homines_. (Cp. Sharon
Turner, as cited, vol. iii, bk. viii, ch. 9.) Thus the largest
numbers of ostensible freemen are found in the lately settled
Danish districts, and the largest number of slaves where most of
the old British population survived (Ashley, _Economic History_,
1888, i, 17, 18; Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and
Commerce_, 1891, i, 88). "The eastern counties are the home of
liberty" (Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, p. 23). The main
totals are: _bordarii_, 82,119; _villani_, 108,407; _servi_,
25,156; that is, 215,000 heads of families, roughly speaking, all
of whom were more or less "unfree," out of an entire enumerated
male population of 300,000.
The constant tendency was to reduce all shades to one of _nativi_
or born villeins (Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, 4th ed. i,
465); that is to say, the number of absolute serfs tends to lessen,
their status being gradually improved, while higher grades tend to
be somewhat lowered. Prof. Vinogradoff's research, which aims at
correcting Mr. Seebohm's, does but disclose that villenage in
general had three aspects:--"Legal theory and political
disabilities would fain make it all but slavery; the manorial
system ensures it something of the character of the Roman
_colonatus_; there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of
Saxon tradition" (_Villainage in England_, 1892, p. 137; cp.
Seebohm, as cited, p. 409; and Stubbs, Sec. 132, i, 462-65). Even the
comparatively "free" socmen were tied to the land and were not
independent yeomen (Ashley, i, 19); and even "freedmen" were often
tied to a specified service by the act of manumission (Dunham, as
cited, iii, 51). As to Teutonic slavery in general, cp. C.-F.
Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, French tr. 1878, i, 41-44, and U.R.
Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. 1900, i, 116; as to France,
cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'Histoire de France_, edit. 1847, pp.
162-72; _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e edit. iii,
172, 190-203; and as to the Netherlands, see above, pp. 295-96.
There is a tendency on the one hand to exaggerate the significance of
the data, as when we identify the lot of an ancient serf or villein with
that of a negro in the United States of sixty years ago;[993] and on the
other hand to forget, in familiarity with scholarly research, the
inevitable moral bearing of all degrees of bondage. The _villanus_ "both
is and is not a free man"; but the "not" is none the less morally
significant: "though he may be _liber homo_, he is not _francus_";[994]
and his name carries a slur. An immeasurable amount of moral history is
conveyed in the simple fact that "slave" was always a term of abuse;
that "villain" is just "villein"; that "caitiff" is just "captive"; and
that "churl" is just "ceorl." So the "neif" (= _naif_ = native) becomes
the "knave";[995] the "scullion" the "blackguard"; and the homeless
wanderer the "vagabond"; even as for the Roman "the guest," _hostis_,
was "the enemy." The "rogue" has doubtless a similar descent, and "rogue
and peasant-slave" in Tudor times, when slavery had ceased, stood for
all things contemptible. Men degrade and impoverish their fellows, and
out of the created fact of deprivation make their worst aspersions;
never asking who or what it is that thus turns human beings into
scullions, churls, blackguards, knaves, caitiffs, rogues, and villains.
The Greeks knew that a man enslaved was a man demoralised; but saw in
the knowledge no motive for change of social tactics. Still less did the
Saxons; for their manumissions at the bidding of the priest were but
penitential acts, in no way altering the general drift of things.
Green (_Short History_, ch. i, Sec. 6, ed. 1881, pp. 54, 55), laying
stress on the manumissions, asserts that under Edgar "slavery was
gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church." But this
is going far beyond the evidence. Green seems to have assumed that
the laws framed by Dunstan were efficacious; but they clearly were
not. (Cp. C. Edmond Maurice, _Tyler, Bale, and Oldcastle_, 1875,
pp. 14-18.) Kemble rightly notes--here going deeper than Prof.
Vinogradoff--that there was a constant process of new slave-making
(_Saxons_, i, 183-84; cp. Maitland, p. 31); and in particular
notes how "the honours and security of service became more
anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom" (p. 184). There
is in short a law of worsenment in a crude polity as in an advanced
one. Green himself says of the slave class that it "sprang mainly
from debt or crime" (_The Making of England_, 1885, p. 192; cp.
_Short History_, p. 13). But debt and "crime" were always arising.
Compare his admissions in _The Conquest of England_, 2nd ed. pp.
444, 445. Elsewhere he admits that slaves were multiplied by the
mutual wars of the Saxons (p. 13); and Kemble, recognising "crime"
as an important factor, agrees (i, 186) with Eichhorn and Grimm in
seeing in war and conquest the "principal and original cause of
slavery in all its branches." A battle would make more slaves in a
day than were manumitted in a year. Some slaves indeed, as in the
Roman Empire, were able to buy their freedom (Maurice, as cited, p.
20, and refs.; Dunham, as cited, iii, 51); but there can have been
few such cases. (Cp. C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, French
tr. i, 41-44, as to the general tendencies of Teutonic slavery.)
The clergy for a time promoted enfranchisement, and even set an
example in order to widen their own basis of power; but as Green
later notes (ch. v, Sec. 4, p. 239) the Church in the end promoted
"emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own."
Green further makes the vital admission that "the decrease of
slavery was more than compensated by the increasing degradation of
the bulk of the people.... Religion had told against political
independence"--for the Church played into the hands of the king.
During the Danish invasions, which involved heavy taxation
(_Danegeld_) to buy off the invaders, slavery increased and
worsened; and Cnut's repetition of the old laws against the foreign
slave trade can have availed little (Maurice, as cited, pp. 23-24).
Prof. Abdy, after recognising that before the Conquest English
liberties were disappearing like those of France (_Lectures on
Feudalism_, 1890, pp. 322, 326-27, 331), argues that, though the
tenure of the villein was servile, he in person was not bond (App.
p. 428). "Bond" is, of course, a term of degree, like others; but
if "not bond" means "freeman," the case will not stand. The sole
argument is that "had he been so [bond], it is difficult to
understand his admission into the conference [in the procedure of
the Domesday Survey] apparently on an equality with the other
members of the inquest." Now he was plainly not on an equality. The
inquest was to be made through the sheriff, the lord of the manor,
the parish priest, the reeve, the bailiff, and _six_ villeins out
of each hamlet (_Id._ p. 360). It is pretty clear that the villeins
were simply witnesses to check, if need were, the statements of
their superiors.
The weightiest argument against the darker view of Saxon serfdom is
the suggestion of the late Prof. Maitland (_Domesday Book_, p. 223)
that the process of technical subordination, broadly called
feudalism, was really a process of infusion of law and order. But
he confessedly made out no clear case, and historical analogy is
against him.
Finally, though under the Normans the Saxon slaves appear to have
gained as beside the middle grades of peasants (Morgan, _England
under the Normans_, p. 225; Ashley, i, 18), it is a plain error to
state that the Bristol slave-trade was suppressed under William by
"the preaching of Wulfstan, and the influence of Lanfranc" (Green,
_Short History_, p. 55; also in longer _History_, i, 127; so also
Bishop Stubbs, i, 463, _note_. The true view is put by Maurice, as
cited, p. 30). The historian incidentally reveals later (_Short
History_, ch. vii, Sec. 8, p. 432, proceeding on Giraldus Cambrensis,
_Expugnatio Hiberniae_, lib. i, c. 18) that "at the time of Henry
II's accession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been
kidnapped and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and
the spiritual menaces of the English Church." (Cp. Hallam, _Middle
Ages_, iii, 316, _note_.) He admits, too (p. 55), that "a hundred
years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was sometimes
said to spring from breeding slaves for the market." The "market"
was for concubines and prostitutes, as well as for labourers. (Cp.
Southey, _Book of the Church_, ed. 1824, i, 115, following William
of Malmesbury; and Hallam, as last cited.) Gibbon justifiably
infers (ch. 38, Bohn ed. iv, 227) that the children of the Roman
slave market of the days of Gregory the Great, _non Angli sed
angeli_, were sold into slavery by their parents. "From the first
to the last age," he holds, the Anglo-Saxons "persisted in this
unnatural practice." Cp. Maurice, as cited, pp. 4-5. Gregory
actually encouraged the traffic in English slaves after he became
Pope. (_Ep. to Candidus_, cited in pref. to Mrs. Elstoh's trans. of
the Anglo-Saxon Homily, p. xi.)
Thus, under Saxon, Danish, and Norman law alike, a slave trade
persisted for centuries. As regards the conditions of domestic
slavery, it seems clear that the Conquest lowered the status of the
half-free; but on the other hand "there was a great decrease in the
number of slaves in Essex between the years 1065 and 1085" (Morgan,
as cited, p. 225; cp. Maitland, p. 35).
In Saxondom, for centuries before the Conquest, "history" is made
chiefly by the primitive forces of tribal and local animosity, the
Northmen coming in to complicate the insoluble strifes of the earlier
English, partly uniting these against them, dominating some, and getting
ultimately absorbed in the population, but probably constituting for
long an extra source of conflict in domestic politics. A broad
difference of accent, as in the Scandinavian States down to our own day,
is often a strain on fellowship. In any case, the Anglo-Saxons at the
time of the Conquest, as always from the time of their own entry, showed
themselves utterly devoid of the "gift of union" which has been ascribed
to their "race," as to the Roman. No "Celts" were ever more hopelessly
divided: the Battle of Hastings is the crowning proof.[996] And in the
absence of leading and stimulus from a higher culture, so little
progressive force is there in a group of struggling barbaric communities
that there was only the scantiest political and other improvement in
Saxon England during hundreds of years. When Alfred strove to build up a
civilisation, he turned as a matter of course to the Franks.[997] The
one civilising force was that of the slight contacts kept up with the
Continent, perhaps the most important being the organisation of the
Church. It was the Norman Conquest, bringing with it a multitude of new
contacts, and an entrance of swarms of French and Flemish artificers and
clerics, that decisively began the civilisation of England. The Teutonic
basis, barbarous as it was, showed symptoms of degeneration rather than
of development. In brief, France was mainly civilised through Italy;
England was mainly civilised through France.
Bishop Stubbs, after admitting as much (Sec. 91, i, 269, 270) and
noting the Norman "genius for every branch of organisation,"
proceeds to say "that the Norman polity had very little substantial
organisation of its own, and that it was native energy that wrought
the subsequent transformation." His own pages supply the disproof.
See in particular as to the legislative and administrative activity
of Henry II, Sec. 147, i, 530-33. As to the arrest or degeneration of
the Saxon civilisation, cp. Sec. 79, i, 227, 228; Sharon Turner,
_History of England during the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 1, 73; H.W.
C. Davis, _England under the Normans and the Angevins_, 1905, p. 1;
Pearson, _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_,
1867, i, 288, 308-12, 321, 343, 346, 347; Abdy, as cited above. Mr.
Pearson's testimony, it should be noted, is that of a partisan and
eulogist of the "race."
Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population
"erscheint nicht uebergross," admits that the dependent stratum of
the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land
system. In time of war the class increased through the ruin of the
small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the
landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new
acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the
possessing class" (_Geschichte des englischen Self-Government_,
1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the
Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only
in the multiplication of the dependent classes." Among the symptoms
of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings
and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth
centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.
In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there
had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their
lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible
cruelty.[998] William's enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need
among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition;
and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all
classes in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of
France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld
book"--a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old
Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion,
therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of
civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest
were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its
first social and psychological effect was to set up new class relations,
and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who
spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and
close class union. When the people's speech began to compete with that
of their masters, and the nobles separately began to be on good terms
with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as
between neighbouring nobles and their retainers; and in Scotland the
weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England,
especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early
baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the
strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing
itself, tended to unite the nobles as a class for their own
aggrandisement and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the
support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage
sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own
share of power and privilege.
The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the
light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much
property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002]
representing a special source of strife, although its non-military
character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to
throw in its lot with king or nobles, or with the democracy (as in
Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic
interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the
king's friend into the king's antagonist, is the most dramatic instance
of the Church's necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act
as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and
counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing
on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English
constitutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further,
being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their
own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its
celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces,
exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among
competing interests.[1003]
The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in
such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising
elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again
flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch
with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful
variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture
introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004]
could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry
I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but
the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the
Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of
French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure
from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the
nobles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative
methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a
French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort.
The assumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government
shaped the process is one of the superstitions of racial and national
vanity.
Dr. C.H. Pearson's reiteration of the old "race" dogma (_History of
England during the Early and Middle Ages_, i, 277) is its
sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_. In the English manner, he
connects with old _Welsh_ usages of revenge the late _Irish_
tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to
_America_"--as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes
in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast
of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow,
constitutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own
showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards
liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English
common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions.
In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and
Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the
rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the _sixth_ century
with Saxon usage of the _eleventh_, this while admitting the
lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should
require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to
prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the
_Faustrecht_, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century,
and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English
Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson's.
Mr. J.H. Round's way of taking it for granted (_The Commune of
London_, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently
and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought.
Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against
a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole
centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they
are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in
foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the
Anglo-Saxons.
One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of
reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his _England under the
Normans and Angevins_ (1905). After setting out with the avowal
that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches
(p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and
painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress,
from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after
soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are
inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... passed
by their more deliberate competitors." How a Teutonic race, given
these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpassed and finally
uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (_id._ p. 2), the theorist does
not attempt to explain.
To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the
political circumstances, was it due that there grew up in island
England, instead of an all-powerful feudal nobility and a mainly
depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of
classes, in which the king's policy against the nobility restrained and
feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making
sub-tenants king's liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of
barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king
is better for the people than the tyranny of nobles; and the destruction
of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal
prestige counts for something as against baronial self-assertion; but
aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king,
on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations,
originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008]
Even the class tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations
in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to
those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold
for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011]
What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to
foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the
aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the
English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry
and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important
military force, which has its own prestige.
Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end
aggrandise the upper as against the lower classes, developing as they do
the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper
class, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law.
In particular, the king's power is always aggrandised when nobility and
people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed,
had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to
procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his
reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014]
encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle classes; but all the
while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between
traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not
be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great
external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in
which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed class was
necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the
Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people
and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign
aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the
nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the
growth of class superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In
the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had
actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the
train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the
arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the
new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the
development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the
law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so
stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of
systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the
period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the
Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially
worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw
in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their
servitude.[1019]
An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is
the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the
auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this
departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later
historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without
inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a
matter of fact, Simon de Montfort's Parliament was the application by a
naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in
the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by
the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain.
There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat
together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de
Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may
well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century
the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at
least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in
Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the
effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and
Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of
justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons
forced him to make the most of the burgher class, who had stood by him
in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately
from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when
deputies from all the districts met in general assembly and bound
themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced,
under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the
civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it
was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the
power of the crown, the monarchic superstition availing to divide even
the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna
Carta by King John.
Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general
acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting
cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, _Histor. View
of the European Nations_, Crichton's tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to
the priority of the institution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, _History
of Spain_, Hume's ed. i, 370; and Prescott, _Hist. of the Reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its
existence in Sicily (_circa_ 1232), see Milman, _Hist. of Latin
Christianity_, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, _Considerazioni
sopra la Storia di Sicilia_, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap.
v); and Von Raumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen_ (Aufg. 1857-58,
B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, _The Carafas
of Maddaloni_, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick's
assemblies, too, were called _Parlamente_. He in turn had, of
course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least
of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.
As to Simon's object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (_Europe
during the Middle Ages_, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to
strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty,"
though the step was too congruous with general developments not to
be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53;
Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (_Wealth of
Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in
the states-general of _all_ the great European monarchies
originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support
against the barons. Freeman's statement (_General Sketch of
European History_, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole
English nation, nobles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together"
against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, _Geschichte des
Self-government in England_, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (_Student's
History_, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and
knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III,
writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been
possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish
practice.
As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative
prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent
age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new
risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus
sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own
special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has
generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that
they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston,
or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the
favourite's assailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the
inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad
government. Whether it is noble denouncing favoured noble or Pym
impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal
jealousy.
Sec. 2
A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is
that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war retards
civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some
sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare
yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the
Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between
peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could
not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as
before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West
without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phoenicians had contrived as
much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed
on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is
proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the
crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as
these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for
special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion
must have been small, and the political disintegration great.
Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which
Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the
Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church's code of
Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter
of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of
prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be
played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters
with other classes, or even their moral relations with each other save
in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only
brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that
direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a
minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate
which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold
degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.
It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been
different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the
possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a
laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them.
The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and
then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are
praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English
history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and
kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to retard
civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would
tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have
to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil
war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no
intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when
the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such
cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling
Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic
florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that
literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of
France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.
The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of
financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money
which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never
repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French
were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the
north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus
begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool
trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable
way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the
misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the
Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and
the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in
isolation and ignominy.
It may or may not have been a gain that Edward's victories over France
practically determined the adoption of the middle-class, gallicised
English speech[1032] by the upper classes, who had hitherto been
French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such
as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy
was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and
resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke
French, and so did his nobles. They had hitherto looked with true
aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie--"_rustici
Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam_," in the fashion satirised
in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and
superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the
language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon,
and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.
Cp. Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, pp. 222, 233. Prof. Earle's
quasi-theory of the cause of the recovery of the native tongue
(_Philology of the English Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 44, 66) is purely
fanciful. In the end, as he admits, it was not any native dialect,
but the artificial composite "King's English," much modified by
French, that survived. It is noteworthy that many locutions which
pass in the Bible for specially pure archaic English, as "fourscore
and ten," are simply translations of a French idiom, itself ancient
Celtic translated into Romance. (Cp. the _Introduction to the Study
of the History of Language_, by Strong, Logeman, and Wheeler, 1891,
p. 393.)
The Rev. W. Denton, in his learned and instructive survey of the
subject (_England in the Fifteenth Century_, 1888, pp. 1-7),
remarks that "from some cause, now difficult to trace, great
encouragement was given to French in the reign of Henry III.
Probably the foreign tastes and partialities of the king had
something to do with this" (p. 4). They certainly had. As soon as
he could wield power, "hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were
at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the
judicial and administrative posts about the Court" (Green, _Short
Hist_., ch. iii, Sec. 5, p. 140), as had happened before under Henry
II. Mr. Denton rightly notes (p. 6) how "in the reign of Henry III
the descendants of Norman barons, and the sons of Anglo-Norman
fathers, were proud of the name of Englishmen, and took up arms
against the king's Norman and Angevin favourites, whom they
despised as foreigners." This is the true line of causation. There
is doubtless something in the theory that the general resort to the
use of English in the schools was a result of the Black Death--the
majority of the clergy being destroyed and the new teachers being
unable to instruct in French (Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_,
1893, p. 202); but there were certainly other causes involved. Mr.
de Montmorency (_State Intervention in English Education_, 1902,
pp. 19-23) develops Gasquet's argument with much force, noting
further that many of the foreign priests who survived forsook their
charges. It might be added that the native peasantry necessarily
counted for more in a social as in an economic sense, after the
great fall in their numbers. But the fact that the Death came in
the period of the successful French wars of Edward III is clearly
of capital importance. But for the moral reaction from these wars,
the tendency would have been to procure new relays of French
priests.
It is indeed conceivable that, but for hostilities with France,
French would have steadily gained ground through literature,
depressing and discrediting the vernacular. On this view it was the
continuance of resistance by the Welsh that probably prevented the
absorption of the Saxon speech by that of the conquered British;
and it is similarly arguable that it was the relation of hostility
between the Carlovingian Franks and the more easterly Germans that
determined the supremacy of the Romance speech in French. The point
is worth psychological investigation.
Though, however, Chaucer's own new-English work is part of the result,
the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from
Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by
destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less
injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars
which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively
to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is
always important to remember, were the result of the young king's acting
on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all
too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to
domestic sedition, foreign war unified the mass of the people and fixed
them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify
them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may
always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided
than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of
foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as
an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the
movement on its moral side.[1036] One man's egoism could thus sway the
whole nation's evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal
which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that
the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.
Sec. 3
In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth
century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The
great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the
depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)--a relation of cause
and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to
insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it
was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie,"
which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against
taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt
sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the
improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of
laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not
strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in
1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle class, now hardened in
class insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of
tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down
those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern
risings had been crushed, the men of Essex were told by Richard, who had
given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them,
inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their
masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain,
in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared
that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs,
"were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of
economics, that despite this temper serfage did gradually die out, the
people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason
of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the
grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade's rebellion, in
1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as
it did for the suppression of the system under which the nobles
plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.
The question as to the rate at which the population recovered from
the Black Death has been discussed by Prof. Thorold Rogers, Mr.
Seebohm, and Prof. Cunningham (see the latter's _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce_, 1891, i, 304). Prof. Rogers, on the one
hand, maintains that by 1377, when the tax rolls seem to give a
population of about two and a half millions (cp. Dunton, _England
in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 130), the population had recovered
all it had lost in the Plague, he being of opinion that the England
of that age could not at any time support more than two and a half
millions. Mr. Seebohm, with whom Dr. Cunningham substantially
concurs (see also Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, p. 249, and
Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_, 1893, p. 194), thinks that the
return of the Plague in 1361 and 1369, and the unsettled state of
the country, must have prevented recuperation; and, accepting the
loose calculation that the Plague destroyed half the population
(Mr. Pearson says "one-half or two-thirds"; Dr. Gasquet endorses
the general view that "fully one half" were destroyed), he
concludes that the population before 1348 may have been five
millions.
The truth surely lies between these extremes. That the population
should not at all have recovered in twenty-five years is extremely
unlikely. That it should have restored a loss of thirty-three per
cent in twenty-five years, which is what Prof. Rogers's position
amounts to, is still more unlikely (see his _Six Centuries of Work
and Wages_, pp. 223, 226, where the mortality is estimated at
one-third). It is besides utterly incongruous with Prof. Rogers's
own repeated assertion that "during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries the population of England and Wales was almost
stationary" (_Industrial and Commercial History of England_, pp.
46, 49; _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 337; _Economic
Interpretation of History_, p. 53). How could a medieval population
conceivably stand for half a century at a given figure, then,
having been reduced by one-third, replace the loss in twenty-five
years, and thereafter continue to subsist without further increase
for two centuries more?
On the other hand, there is a natural tendency in every suddenly
depleted population to reproduce itself for a time at a quickened
rate; and in the England of the latter half of the fourteenth
century the conditions would encourage such an effort. The lack of
house-room and settlement which normally checked increase (cp.
Stubbs, Sec. 493) was remedied for a large number of persons; and the
general feeling would be all in favour of marriage and repopulation
(cp. Rogers, _Six Centuries_, p. 226, where, however, evidence
obviously bad is accepted as to multiplied births), though just
after the Plague there would be a great stimulus to the extension
of pasture, since that needed fewer hands than tillage.
On the whole, we may reasonably surmise that the population before
1348 was, not five millions, but between three and four millions
(so Green, ch. v, Sec. 4, p. 241, who, however, takes the somewhat
excessive view that "more than one-half were swept away," and
further, p. 239, that the population "seems to have all but tripled
since the Conquest"), and that it was prevented regaining that
figure in the next century by the economic preference of
sheep-farming to tillage. Mr. Rogers expressly admits (_Six
Centuries_, p. 233) that "the price of labour, proclamations and
statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates," and
repeatedly asserts that "the labourers remained masters of the
situation." On his own principles, this goes to prove that their
numbers remained lower than of old. He infers a "considerable loss
of life" in the famine of 1315-16 from the immediate rise of
agricultural wages (from 23 to 30 per cent), of which on the
average 20 per cent was permanent. Here there is a presumption that
even before 1315 the population was greater than afterwards. Yet
again he states (p. 326, etc.) that "the _fifteenth_ century and
the first quarter of the _sixteenth_ were the golden age of the
English labourer"--a proposition which staggers credence. Cp. W.J.
Corbett, in _Social England_, ii, 382-84.
It is impossible, however, to attain demonstration either on that
head or as regards the numbers of the population in the periods
under notice. Mr. Rogers's claims to give decisive evidence show a
serious misconception of what constitutes proof; and there is
special reason to distrust his conclusion that population was no
greater at the end of Elizabeth's reign than in that of Henry IV.
Cp. Mr. Gibbins's _Industrial History of England_, pp. 107-108.
Prof. J.E. Symes (in _Social England_, iii, 128, 129) decides that
a "great increase of the population undoubtedly took place in the
reign of Henry VIII," adopting the estimate that the total at the
death of Henry VII was about two and a half millions, and at the
death of Henry VIII about four millions. As to the population at
the Conquest, see Sharon Turner's _History of the Anglo-Saxons_,
bk. viii, c. 9, vol. iii, and Dunton, as cited, pp. 128-29. It was
then probably below two millions; and in the reign of Edward II it
may well have been over three millions; for Bishop Pecock about
1450 (cited by Dunton, p. 130 _note_) speaks of a long-continued
decrease, such as would be caused by the wars in France and at
home. But the assertion of Tyndale in 1532 (_id._ _ib._), that the
population was then less by a third than in the time of Richard II,
must be dismissed as a delusion set up by the phenomena of agrarian
depopulation in certain districts. On this see below, p. 405.
It is important to note, finally, that it was in the age of raised
standard of comfort that there occurred the first wide diffusion of
critical heresy in England. Wiclif's popular Lollardry was one phase of
a movement that went deeper in thought and further afield in social
reform than his, since he himself felt driven to confute certain
opponents of belief in the Scriptures, and at the same time to repudiate
the doctrine that vassals might resist tyrant lords.[1041] Had he not
done so, he might have had a less peaceful end; but it is clear that
many men were in the temper to apply to lay matters the demand for
reform which he restricted to matters ecclesiastical.[1042] John Ball's
rising, however, promptly elicited the much superior strength of the
feudal military class; and though in 1395 there were still Lollards to
petition to Parliament for the abolition of "unnecessary trades," as
well as war and capital punishment and the Catholic practices afterwards
rejected by Protestantism, their Utopia was as hopeless as that of the
insurgent peasants. Even had the invasion of France not come about to
bribe and demoralise the nation at large, turning it from domestic
criticism to the plunder of a neighbouring State, the nobility of the
period were utterly incapable of an intellectual ideal; and any sympathy
shown by any section of them for Lollardry was the merest opportunism,
proceeding on resentment of Papal exactions or on a premature hope of
plundering the Church.[1043] The moment Lollardry openly leant towards
criticism of nobility as well as clergy, they were ready to give it up
to destruction; and the determining cause of the fall of Richard II was
that, besides alienating the nobles at once by maintaining a peace
policy, and by refusing to let them go to all lengths in oppressing the
labourers, he alienated the clergy by sheltering the Lollards.[1044] It
was the clergy who turned the balance, embracing the cause of Henry IV,
who in turn systematically supported them,[1045] as did his son after
him. Henry V, the national hero-king, and his father were the first
burners of "Protestant" heretics; and it was under Henry IV, in 1401,
that there was passed the Act suppressing the voluntary schools of the
Lollards.[1046] Doubtless it was a push of the Lollards that carried the
later Act of 1406, permitting all men and women to send their sons and
daughters "to any school that pleaseth them in the realm;"[1047] but the
limitation of school-keeping to the Church was an effective means of
limiting the education given; and "by 1430 the Church had recovered from
the Lollard revolt against her universal authority."
Mr. Lecky, in his theory of the English aristocracy, credits the
nobility with an "eminently popular character" from time
immemorial, and cites Comines as to "the singular humanity of the
nobles to the people during the civil wars" (_History of England in
the Eighteenth Century_, small ed. i, 212, 213). The nobility, in
the circumstances, had need to treat the people better than those
of France normally did (which was what Comines was thinking of).
Their own wealth--what was left of it--came from the people, to
whom, further, they looked for followers. And Comines in the same
passage (bk. v, ch. xx) notes that the English people were "more
than ordinarily jealous" of their nobility. Of course, the
difference between French and English practice dates further back,
as above noted.
Similarly misleading is Mr. Lecky's statement that "the Great
Charter had been won by the barons, but ... it guaranteed the
rights of all freemen." Mr. Gardiner expressly points out
(_Student's History_, p. 182; cp. his _Introduction to English
History_, pp. 66-67) that the Charter "was won by a combination
between all classes of freemen." London had harboured and aided the
barons' force; and the clergy were closely concerned. (Cp.
McKechnie, _Magna Carta_, 1905, p. 41.) The representative
assembly summoned by John in 1213 stood for the combination of the
three classes. Green (_Short History_, illust. ed. i, 242, 243)
uses language which countenances Mr. Lecky, but shows (pp. 235-43)
the need the barons felt for aid, and the influence of the Church
and the traders. Compare the language of his longer history (1885,
i, 244), and his express admission as to the depression the
baronage had undergone a century later (_id._ p. 300). Dr. Stubbs
(_Const. Hist._ i, 571, 583) also indicates that the people
co-operated, though he uses expressions (pp. 570, 579) which
obscure the facts in Mr. Lecky's favour. Guizot (_Essais_, p. 282)
recognises that the movement was national. Buckle, too, made the
point clear long ago (3-vol. ed. ii, 114-20; 1-vol. ed. pp.
350-54). But it is noted even in what he called "the wretched work
of Delolme," and was in Buckle's day a generally accepted truth.
Cp. Ch. de Remusat, _L'Angleterre du 18ieme siecle_, 1856, i, 33.
It is worth noting in this connection that the Magna Carta,
considered in itself, is a rather deceptive historical document.
Not only did it need the defeat of John and his German and Flemish
allies by the French at Bouvines to enable even the combined lords
and commons and clergy to extort the Charter, but the combination
was being progressively destroyed by John, by means of his army of
French mercenaries, when the barons in despair persuaded the French
king to send an invading force, which was able to land owing to the
ruin of John's fleet in a storm. Thereupon John's French troops
deserted him. Cp. Green, pp. 122-26; Stubbs, ii, 3, 9-16; and
McKechnie, pp. 53-57, as to the King's energy and the weakness and
inner divisions of the national combination. Thus it was indirectly
to French action that England owed first the Magna Carta and then
the check upon the King's vengeance, as it was to the Frenchman,
Simon de Montfort, later, that it owed the initiative of a
three-class Parliament. And, indeed, but for the King's death, the
constitutional cause might well have collapsed in the end.
Sec. 4
The Wars of the Roses, by destroying in large part the nobility,
relatively advantaged the middle class,[1048] as well as the king whose
reign followed. Already under Edward IV the powers of Parliament were
much curtailed, and indeed paralysed;[1049] this, which is charged as a
sin upon the monarch, being the natural result of his gain of power on
the ruin of the baronage. Edward IV only did what Edward I and III would
have done if in their situation it had been possible, and what Edward II
and Richard II sought to do, but were too weak to compass. The fourth
Edward's situation and his force of will together made his power. Not
only was the nobility half exterminated, but the trading and middle
classes alike desired a strong ruler who should maintain order, by
whatever straining of constitutional forms--the invariable sequel of
anarchy--at least up to the point of intolerable taxation.[1050] The
actual increase of commerce during the wars[1051] is a good proof of the
separateness of class interests, and of the decline of the military
ideal. Much of it would seem to have been due to the example set by the
Hansa merchants, who had factories at London,[1052] Boston, and Lynn,
and whose famous League was then powerful enough to force from Edward IV
a renewal of its English privileges in return for a concession of a
share in the Baltic trade.[1053] In any case, the new development was on
the old lines of energetic self-seeking; and already in the reign of
Edward IV the cloth manufacture was carried on by capitalists in the
modern spirit.[1054] And as the tyrannies of the king were less general
and oppressive than the tyrannies of the nobles, the erection of the
regal power on the collapse of the old class cohesion gave a new scope
for the strife of classes among and for themselves. No national ideal
existed (as apart from the readiness to unite in hate of a foreign
nation) in monarchic England any more than in old republican Greece or
modern republican Italy. The trade gilds were strictly self-seeking
institutions, aiming at keeping down the number of competitors in each
trade, without providing in any way for the aspirants. Unitary egoism
was the universal mainspring. The Church sought above all things to be
protected against heresy; the town and trade corporations sought
protection for their privileges; and the landowners sought to be
supported against the labourers, who from the time of Henry VI are found
revolting against enclosures of public land, and were temporarily
reinforced by the disbanded retainers of the barons. Every modern force
of social disintegration was already nascent.
Cp. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i,
395-96, 413, 425; Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, Sec.Sec. 486-92 (iii,
586-616). "In every great town there was, every few years,
something of a struggle, something of a crisis ... between trade
and craft, or craft and craft, or magistracy and commons" (Stubbs,
iii, 616). Prof. Ashley (_Introd. to Econ. Hist._ i, 79) disputes
that there was "any such contest in this country between burghers
and artisans" as took place on the continent; and cites another
passage from Bishop Stubbs (Sec. 131; i, 453) partly suggesting such a
view. But Prof. Ashley goes on (pp. 79-84) to show that there _was_
a good deal of struggling even in England between burghers and
artisans. Cp. his conclusions, pp. 6-10, 42, as to the process of
evolution towards at least formal unity. It is to be noted that the
gilds dispensed charity (Stubbs, iii, 616, 619).
Sec. 5
Under Henry VII the same conditions subsisted. There was no sufficiently
strong body of aristocracy left to rebel effectually against his
exactions, though exactions had always been the great cause of
discontent; and, all rivals collapsing, there grew up round the new
dynasty that hedging superstition which had always counted for much, and
which was in England to become a main factor in politics. Henry VII
wrought assiduously and astutely to build up his power, seeking no less
to increase the merchant class than to depress the aristocracy. From
both he thus drew his revenue; from the latter by exaction; from the
former by customs duties on the trade he carefully encouraged (as
Richard had done before him), finding in such revenue his surest
income.[1055] Gradually the monarchic system was made firm. Richard III
owed his failure mainly to the sense of the illegality of his position;
and the same inversion of the superstition troubled Henry VII in turn,
as it had done Henry IV. It seems to have been his possession of the one
train of artillery in the kingdom that mainly preserved his power
against rebels.[1056] But with Henry VIII the dynasty was secure; and
from this point onward the monarchic spell can be seen very clearly in
English affairs. The instinct of "loyalty," a moral prepossession
religiously sanctioned, becomes a social force as truly as the simpler
instincts of self-seeking and class spirit. By virtue of it, and of his
own force of brute will, Henry VIII could commit violences of almost
every description, his own personality having some of the
characteristics most likely to intensify the spell. Energy such as his
hypnotised or terrorised all but the strongest. Even his crimes were not
such as revolted average sympathy: the suppression of the Church, as in
nearly all the "Teutonic" countries, was a direct bribe to many of the
nobles and landowners,[1057] and for the multitude meant the overthrow
of an alien jurisdiction; and his domestic procedure satisfied the
popular ethic which demurs to mistresses but respects bigamy, and finds
a wife's adultery more criminal than her husband's murder of her. For
the rest, he had at the beginning of his reign executed his father's
minions, and conciliated the scholars, who made opinion. Yet under Henry
VIII we find middle-class England, heavily taxed for war, beginning to
stand on its rights as upper-class England had done in earlier times;
and in the new England as in the old the weakest class went to the wall.
The ever-increasing mass of poor, thrown idle and hungry by the
continuous rise of sheep-farms in the place of tillage, were the natural
enemies of the governing class as well as of the landowners; and in
cruelly repressing them the monarchy strengthened the landowners'
allegiance.
Thus arose the typical personal monarchy, employing middle-class
ministers, who served it zealously and with increasing power, Thomas
Cromwell far outgoing Wolsey. The passing coalition of nobles and yeomen
in the north in the cause of the old religion was followed by the
crushing of the remains of the old nobility, now being rapidly replaced
by the new, established on the plunder of the Church. It is to be noted
that in England, as in so many other countries, the virtual subjection
of the old nobility to the crown was for a time followed by stirrings of
new life in all directions, as if feudalism had everywhere meant a
repression of possible energy. The process is seen in Spain under
Ferdinand and Isabella;[1058] in France under Richelieu and Mazarin; in
Sweden under Gustavus Vasa; and is thus plainly a product not of
doctrinal Protestantism, as some suppose, but of the comparative social
and political liberty that follows on the restriction of ubiquitous
feudal tyranny, so much more searching and pervasive a force than the
simpler tyranny of the feudal king. It may be doubted, indeed, whether
the Tudor suppression of the power of the old aristocracy was not as
vital a determination of the nation's course as the overthrow of the
Catholic Church.
As against Mr. Lecky's indiscriminate panegyric of the English
nobility, it is instructive to note Hallam's judgment on the
peerage under Henry VIII: "They yielded to every mandate of his
imperious will ... they are responsible for the illegal trial, for
the iniquitous attainder, for the sanguinary statute, for the
tyranny which they sanctioned by law, and for that which they
permitted to subsist without law. Nor was this selfish and
pusillanimous subserviency more characteristic of the minions of
Henry's favour than of the representatives of ancient and
honourable houses, the Norfolks, the Arundels, and the Shrewsburys.
We trace the noble statesmen of these reigns concurring in all the
inconsistencies of the revolutions; supporting all the religions of
Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth; adjudging the death of Somerset
to gratify Northumberland, and of Northumberland to redeem their
participation in his fault; setting up the usurpation of Lady Jane,
and abandoning her on the first doubt of success, constant only in
the rapacious acquisition of estates and honours from whatever
source, and in adherence to the present power" (_Constitutional
History_, 10th ed. i, 48).
Sec. 6
And now effectively arose the new political force of Protestant and
Bible-worshipping fanaticism, turning the democratic instinct into its
channel, and complicating afresh the old issues of classes. It is not to
be forgotten that this was a beginning of popular culture, inasmuch as
the desire to read the worshipped book must have counted for more than
anything else in making reading common.[1059]
Practically, however, the opposed causes of Lollardism and orthodoxy may
at the outset be regarded as the democratic and the conservative
instincts, taking these channels in the absence of political development
and knowledge.[1060] In imperial Rome, the spread of Christianity was
substantially a movement of class cohesion among the illiterate slaves,
aliens, and workers, the instinct of attraction taking this form when
political grounds of union were lacking. So it was in the England of the
period under notice; but whereas in imperial Rome the autocracy went far
to annul class distinctions, and so helped the slaves' cult to absorb
superstitious patricians, especially women, whose wealth maintained the
poor of the Church as the emperor's doles had maintained the poor of the
State, in England the vigour of class distinctions fostered differences
of sect. The phenomena of political Protestantism in the Reformation era
in England, as in Germany, offer many parallels to those of the French
Revolution. The revolt of many priests from the routine and restrictions
of their office is notable in both epochs. On the other hand, the mass
of the well-to-do classes, being unprepared for change by any educative
process, were as ready to restore Catholic usages as were those of
France later; and when the innovating forces, consisting in a little
reasoning and much rapine, had run to seed and to corruption under the
Protectorate and Edward VI, the reaction towards the old forms set in
powerfully. Nothing, however, could carry it to the length of restoring
the Catholic Church's property; and the failure of Mary was due not
nearly so much to Protestant dislike of the ceremonial of Rome as to the
grip of the new owners on the confiscated lands. In England as in
Scotland, in Germany, in the Scandinavian States, and in Switzerland,
though Henry stood for a special initiative, the driving forces of the
Reformation were mainly those of wealth-seeking; and the financial
records of the Protectorate show a conspiracy of plunder to which the
annals of monarchy could offer no parallel. The Protestant aristocracy
simply encouraged the new Lollardism by way of gaining their personal
ends, as they had crushed the old because it menaced their property.
"Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern money had
been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal
expenditure had mounted in seventy years to more than four times
its previous total" (Green, ch. vii, Sec. 1, and p. 353). A system of
wholesale corruption and waste had grown up under Henry VIII, who,
after all his confiscations, was fain to seek funds by adulterating
his coin. So Edward VI, the church and college plunder being gone,
had to be granted taxes on manufactures which tended to stop them.
"Yet I cannot find," says Sir Roger Twysden, "all this made the
crown rich. Hayward observes Edward's debts were L251,000--at least
said to be so. Camden, that Queen Elizabeth received the crown
_afflictissima_ ... _aere alieno quod Henricus VIII et Edwardus VI
contraxerant oppressa_.... I cannot but reckon the treasure spent
in fifteen years, more than half the kingdom to be sold"
(_Historical Vindication of the Church of England_, ed. 1847, pp.
4, 5). So obviously had the treasure gone into the pockets of
courtiers and their hangers-on, that the fact gives some excuse for
the habitual miserliness of Elizabeth.
A new channel had thus been made for the forces of union and strife. An
instructive part of the process was the movement towards a new
sacerdotalism on the side of the new Calvinistic clergy--a movement much
more clearly visible in Scotland than in England. Whether or not it be
true that "it was by no means the intention of Knox and his
fellow-labourers to erect a new hierarchy upon the ruins of the
old,"[1061] it is clear that his immediate successors counted on
wielding a power strictly analogous to that of the papacy. Andrew
Melville, in haughty colloquy with King James and his councillors, threw
down his Hebrew Bible on the table as his authority for his demands.
Since all alike professed to accept it, the next step in the argument
plainly was that it lay with the presbyter to interpret the sacred
book;[1062] and Melville, who took the king by the sleeve and called him
"God's silly [= weak] vassal," was quite ready to play Gregory to
James's Henry had he been able. The effective check lay in the new
Church's lack of revenue, the lands of the old Church having of course
been retained by the nobles, who carried through the Reformation simply
in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent
nobility[1063] in possession of the feudal power, the Scottish clergy
were nearly as tyrannous socially as their teacher Calvin had been at
Geneva; and for nearly two hundred years Scottish life was no freer and
much more joyless, under the new presbyter, than under the old priest,
though the democratic machinery of the Kirk obviated any need or
opportunity for fiscal exaction.
Sec. 7
As it is with the Reformation period that the play of sheer opinion
begins to appear distinctly in English politics, so it is in this period
that the phenomena of reactions first begin to be in a manner traceable
as distinct from military fluctuations. All faction, of course, is a
form of the play of opinion; but after the fading away of feudalism the
opinion is more easily to be contemplated as a force in itself,
alongside of the simpler instincts; and the ebbing and flowing of causes
suggests a certain consequence of action and reaction in human affairs.
The gain-getting Protestant movement under the Protectorate was followed
by the Catholic reaction under Mary; which again bred reaction by
ferocity. Catholics grew cold in their allegiance when Romanism yielded
such bloody fruits. Protestantism, besides, flourished on the continual
poverty of the lower orders, and on the abeyance of international
strife--conditions which necessarily set up new movements of combination
and repulsion; and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, she served to
represent, however incongruously, the religious leanings of the
democracy, as well as to unite them in the name of patriotism against
Rome and Spain. She, again, profited by the monarchic superstition,
while she was menaced by its inversion; and it is to be observed that as
a woman she gained immunity with her subjects for flaws of character
which in a man would have been odious and despicable, where her rival,
Mary of Scotland, suffered deposition for actions of a kind which in a
man would have been almost spontaneously forgiven. Mary's complicity in
the assassination of a base and unfaithful husband was an unpardonable
crime from the reigning ethical point of view, which was purely
masculine; and the same ethic held in amused toleration the constant bad
faith and personal absurdity of Elizabeth,[1064] which rather flattered
than endangered the pride of sex. Thus could monarchic politics be
swayed by the prevailing psychology of a period, as well as by its class
preponderances and interests. The personality of the monarch always
counted for much in the determination of his power.
Where Elizabeth gained, however, James lost. Her power was consolidated
by the triumph over the Armada, which in the old fashion fused religious
strifes in a common warlike exultation, and definitely made England
Protestant by setting her in deadly enmity towards the great Catholic
power;[1065] just as the state of aggressive hostility towards France
under Edward I and Edward III drew Englishmen of all classes into the
habit of speaking English and discarding the hitherto common use of
French. At the same time the Queen's collisions with Parliament and
people were always the less dangerous because she was a woman, and so
could yield without indignity where a man would have been humiliated and
discredited--an advantage overlooked by the historians who praise her
sagacity. Such as it was, it was in large part the sagacity of
unscrupulousness; and her success is much more the measure of popular
infatuation than of her wisdom. All the while, she had wiser councillors
than almost any English monarch before or since; and much of her
sagacity was theirs, perhaps even down to some of the unscrupulousness;
though on the other hand her fickleness often put them in an evil
aspect. Burghley might say what he would, in the loyalist manner, about
her inspired judgment; but he knew that she imposed Leicester on the
Dutch expedition against his advice, then starved her troops, then upset
everything because of the easily predictable disobedience of Leicester
in accepting the title of Governor-General from the Dutch.[1066] To say
in the face of such methods, as does Mr. Green, that while she had
little or no political wisdom, "her political tact was unerring," is to
frame a spurious paradox. The more than countervailing admission that
"in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a
peer in Christendom" is perhaps overcharged: she could not lie more
habitually and systematically than did Philip; but in both alike the
constant resort to falsehoods for which their antagonists were more or
less prepared, is a proof of want of political tact, no less than of
want of wisdom.[1067] That she should have been idolised as she was is
one of the best proofs of the power of the monarchic feeling; for there
has rarely been a less trustworthy woman on a throne. In any circle of
sound human beings she would have been disliked and distrusted; yet
English tradition celebrates her as admirably English, in the act of
blackening by comparison foreign rulers who were at least not
conspicuously falser,[1068] meaner,[1069] or more egotistic. What is
true is that many of the forces with and against which she intrigued
were either unscrupulous or irrational, and that her home tyrannies were
no worse than those which would have been committed by Puritans or
Catholics or Churchmen had these been free to go at each other's throats
as religion bade. Her trickeries on the whole kept things in
equilibrium. But conscienceless trickeries they were, and, as such,
singular grounds for historical enthusiasm. And it cannot have been any
concern for her celibacy, or subtle intuition of its effects on her
character, that endeared her to her subjects; for her often alleged
virginity, despite the gross scandals to the contrary, was an element in
the hallucination concerning her. "Loyalty" haloed her personality.
When, however, she was succeeded by a man certainly not worse or more
ungenerous, the spell was for the most part broken. James was a
Scotchman--a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly
spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity;
and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously
headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal
ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying
Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to
her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's
prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of
criticism. And there can be no doubt that the psychological shrinkage of
the monarchy in public esteem in the person of James prepared the way
for the resistance to it in the reign of his son.
As against the foregoing views of Henry's and Elizabeth's
characters, note should be taken of the doctrine of Dr. Gardiner
(_History_, as cited, i, 43) that "Henry VIII must be judged by"
[_i.e._ in view of the merits of] "the great men who supported his
daughter's throne, and who defended the land which he set free when
'he broke the bonds of Rome.' Elizabeth must be judged by the Pyms
and Cromwells, who ... owed their strength to the vigour with which
she _headed_ the resistance of England against Spanish aggression.
She had cleared the way for liberty, though she understood it not."
It seems necessary to enter a demurrer to such moral philosophy,
of which there is too much in recent English historiography.
Considering that the action of Henry towards all who thwarted him
was one of brutal terrorism, and that, save as regards his bribes,
he cowed alike his peers and his people, the courage shown by their
descendants might as rationally be credited to Philip of Spain as
to him. And to credit Elizabeth personally with the defeat of the
Armada, and consequently with the strength of the later Pyms and
Cromwells, is not only to reiterate the same paralogism but to
negate common sense as regards the facts of the Armada episode, in
which the nation did one half of the work, and the storm the other.
Dr. Gardiner, like Mr. Froude, who preaches a similar doctrine,
overlooks the consequence that Catholicism on these principles must
be credited with the production of Henry and Elizabeth, and
therefore with their alleged services. As against such an unmeaning
theory we may note another verdict of Dr. Gardiner's (p. 33):
"Elizabeth has a thousand titles to our gratitude, but it should
never be forgotten that she left, as a legacy to her successor, an
ecclesiastical system which, unless its downward course were
arrested by consummate wisdom, threatened to divide the nation into
two hostile camps, and to leave England, even after necessity had
compelled the rivals to accept conditions of peace, a prey to
theological rancour and sectarian hatred." How then is the account
to be balanced? Dr. Cunningham, we may note, sums up as to the
preceding reigns that "the scandalous confiscations of Henry VIII
and Edward VI were fatal to rural economy and disastrous to
mercantile dealings. The disintegration of society became complete;
... with some exceptions in regard to shipping and possibly in
regard to the repair of the towns, there is no improvement, no
reconstruction which can be traced to the reign of the Tudor kings"
(_English Industry_, i, 433). Cp. Prof. Rogers's _Industrial and
Commercial History_, p. 12.
Sec. 8
While such changes were being wrought at one end of the political
organism, others no less momentous, and partly causative of those, had
taken place at the other. By economic writers the period of the
Reformation in England is now not uncommonly marked as that of a great
alteration for the worse in the lot of the mass of the peasantry.[1070]
The connection between the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the
agrarian trouble, however, is not of the primary character that is thus
supposed: it might be rather called accidental than causal. Suppression
of the monasteries could at most only throw into prominence the poverty
which the monasteries relieved, but which monasteries always tend to
develop.[1071] Wholesale eviction of husbandmen to make way for
sheep-farms had taken place, the Church helping, before Henry VIII began
to meddle with the Church; and vagabondage and beggary were common in
consequence.[1072] The distress was there to begin with, and was
increasing, from what period onward it were hard to say.
The early fifteenth-century riots against "enclosures," above mentioned,
arose out of the policy of systematically extending pasture, and point
to a distress set up by the gradual growth of gain-seeking methods among
landowners as against the common people,[1073] whose normal tendency to
multiply was a constant force making for poverty, though it was met
half-way by the aggression of landlords who found it more profitable to
raise and export wool than to farm.[1074] A fresh source of dislocation
was the enforcement of laws against the keeping of bands of retainers, a
process to which Henry VII specially devoted himself,[1075] thus
securing his throne on the one hand while intensifying the evil of
depopulation and decreasing tillage, for which on the other hand he
tried remedial measures,[1076] of the customary description. Laws were
passed forbidding the peasantry to seek industrial employment in the
cities--this course being taken as well in the interests of the trades
as with the hope of restoring agriculture. One outcome of the
circumstances was that sheep-farming, like the cloth manufacture, began
to be carried on by capitalists;[1077] the moneyed classes beginning to
reach out to the country, while the gentry began to draw towards the
towns.[1078] Thus we find in existence long before the Reformation all
the economic troubles which some writers attribute to the methods of the
Reformation; though the Protestant nobles who scrambled for the plunder
of the Church in the reigns of Henry and of Edward VI seem to have done
more sheep-farming and depopulating than any others, thereby disposing
the people the more to welcome Mary.[1079]
Even Prof. Thorold Rogers, who (overlooking the Act 4 Henry VII)
seems to hold that the enclosures in the fifteenth century were not
made at the expense of tillage, and that the earliest complaints
are in the sixteenth century (_History of Agriculture and Prices_,
iv, 63, 64 note, 109: cp. Cunningham, _English Industry_, i, 393
_note_), still shows that there were heavy complaints as early as
1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cc. 5, 6) of a general decay of towns and growth
of pastures--long before Henry had meddled with the Church. Bishop
Stubbs is explicit on the subject as regards the period of York and
Lancaster:--"The price of wool enhanced the value of pasturage; the
increased value of pasturage withdrew field after field from
tillage; the decline of tillage, the depression of the markets, and
the monopoly of the wool trade by the staple towns, reduced those
country towns which had not encouraged manufacture to such poverty
that they were unable to pay their contingent to the revenue, and
the regular sum of tenths and fifteenths was reduced by more than a
fifth in consequence. The same causes which in the sixteenth
century made the enclosure of the commons a most important popular
grievance, had begun to set class against class as early as the
fourteenth century, although the thinning of the population by the
Plague acted to some extent as a corrective" (_Constitutional
History_, iii, 630; cp. Green, ch. v, Sec. 5, p. 251; ch. vi, Sec. 3, p.
285).
The troubles, again, were fluctuating, the movement of depopulation and
sheep-farming being followed in due course by a revival of tillage,
while contrary movements might be seen in different parts of the
country, according as commercial advantage lay for the moment. In one
district it might pay best to rear sheep; in another, by reason of
nearness to town markets, it might pay best to grow corn; but the
competition of corn imported from the Baltic in return for English
exports would be a generally disturbing force. The very improvement of
agricultural skill, too, in which Holland led the way,[1080] would tend
to lessen employment in the rural districts. Peace and progress, in the
absence of science, always thus provide new sources of distress,
multiplying heads and hands without multiplying the employment which
secures for the multitude a share in the fruits, but always aggrandising
those who have contrived to become possessed of the prime monopolies.
What went on was a perpetual transference and displacement of
well-being, one class rising on another's distress; and after the
apparently steady decay of the towns under Henry VIII,[1081] the new
lead given to industry in the reign of Elizabeth, by the influx of
Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, went to build up an urban
middle class which for the time had no political motives to discontent.
Sir Thomas More, in the very passage of the _Utopia_ in which he
speaks of the wholesale eviction of husbandmen, tells how
"handicraft men, yea, and almost the ploughmen of the country, with
all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud new
fangleness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and
sumptuous fare at their table" (bk. i, Robinson's trans.). New
wealth and new poverty co-existed. "Cheapness and dearness, plenty
and scarcity, of corn and other food, depopulation and rapidly
increasing numbers, really co-existed in the kingdom. There were
places from which the husbandman and labourer disappeared, and the
beasts of the field grazed where their cottages had stood; and
there were places where men were multiplying to the dismay of
statesmen." Cliffe Leslie, essay on _The Distribution and Value of
the Precious Metals_, vol. cited, p. 268. The whole of this essay
is well worth study. Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to Economic
History_, ii, 50-54.
Sec. 9
Hence there was no continuous pressure of agrarian or industrial
politics, and the stress of the instinct of strife went in other
directions. The modern reader, seeking for the class politics of the
later Tudor period, finds them as it were covered up, save for such an
episode as the revolt of 1549, by the record of foreign policy and
ecclesiastical strifes, and is apt to condemn the historian for leaving
matters so. But in reality class politics was for the most part
superseded by sect politics. The new pseudo-culture of bibliolatry,
virtually a sophisticated barbarism, had made new paths for feeling; and
these being the more durable, the miseries of the evicted rural
populations, which forced a Poor Law on the administration, never set up
anything approaching to a persistent spirit of insurrection. By the
suppression of the old feudal nobility, as already noted, life in
general had been made freer; and the monarch for the time being was
become a relatively beneficent and worshipful power in the eyes of the
mass of the people, while the landowners were grown weak for harm. The
destructive passions were running in other channels, and religious hate
swallowed up class hate. For the rest, the new aristocracy was
thoroughly established; and in the life and work of Shakespeare himself
we see the complete acceptance of the readjusted class relation, though
we can also see in his pages the possibilities of a new upper class of
rich merchants. In his impersonal way he flashes the light of Lear's
tardy sympathy on the forlorn world of the homeless poor; and in many a
phrase he condenses an intense criticism of the injustices of class
rule; but even if, as seems certain, he did not write the Jack Cade
scenes in _Henry VI_, he has little of the purposive democrat in him:
rather--though here it is hard indeed to get behind the great humanist's
mask--some touch of the fastidious contempt of the noble, himself fickle
enough, for the changing voice of the ignorant populace.
On one point of current psychology, however, as on the great issue of
religion, Shakespeare's very silence is more significant than speech.
After the passionate outburst put in the mouth of the dying John of
Gaunt, and the normal patriotism of _Henry V_, utterances of his early
manhood, proceeding upon those of the older plays which he re-wrote, we
find in his dramas a notable aloofness from current public passion. This
would of course be encouraged by the regulations for the stage; but no
regulation need have hindered him from pandering habitually to popular
self-righteousness in the matter of national animosities. In 1596 the
multitude were all on the side of the fire-eating Essex and against the
prudent Burghley in the matter of aggressive war upon Spain; hope of
plunder and conquest playing as large a part in their outcry as any
better sentiment. The production of _Henry V_ in 1599, with its
laudatory allusion to Essex's doings in Ireland, whither he had been
accompanied by Shakespeare's patron Southampton, would suggest, if the
passage were of his penning,[1082] that the dramatist was one of Essex's
partisans. But whichever way he then leaned, no man can gather from his
later plays any encouragement to natural passion of any species. It is
not merely that he avoids politics after having been compromised by
contact with them:[1083] it is that he rises to a higher plane of
thought and feeling.[1084] He, if any man, could see the fatuity with
which Englishmen denounced cruelty in Spaniards while matching Spanish
cruelty in Ireland, and cursed the Inquisition while mishandling Jesuit
priests in the Inquisition's own temper. The story of English cruelty in
Ireland in Elizabeth's and James's day is one of the most sickening in
the history of the epoch.[1085] But no sense of guilt ever checked the
blatant self-sufficiency with which the general run of Englishmen of the
time inveighed against the misdeeds of the Spaniards: no twinge of
self-criticism ever modified their righteous thanksgiving over the
defeat of the Armada, which was manned partly to avenge their own
massacre and torture of Catholic priests. Their Drakes and Hawkinses,
playing the pirate and the slave-stealer, and holding with no qualms the
conviction that they were doing God service, made current the cant of
Puritanism in the pre-Puritan generation. Godly ruffianism could not
later go further than it did in "the Elizabethan dawn"; for Milton's
swelling phrase of "God and his Englishmen" did not outgo the
self-satisfaction of the previous age, any more than of the later period
of "Teutonic" self-glorification. To Shakespeare alone seems to have
been possible the simple reflection that God's Spaniards, equating with
God's Englishmen, left zero to the philosopher.