It seems clear that the mass of the people, and such leading men as

Essex and Raleigh, desired a continuance of the state of war with

Spain because of the opportunities it gave for piratical plunder.

The queen, who had shared in the loot of a good many such

expeditions, might have acquiesced but for Burghley's dissuasion.

It was an early sign of predilection to the path of imperialism, on

which Cromwell later put one foot, on which Chatham carried the

nation far, and which it has in later days at times seemed bent on

pursuing. In Elizabeth's day enterprises of plunder, as one writer

has pointed out, "became the usual adventure of the times, by which

the rich expected to increase their wealth and the prodigal to

repair their fortunes"; and the general imagination was fired with

similar hopes, till "the people were in danger of acquiring the

habits and the calculations of pirates." (J. M'Diarmid, _Lives of

British Statesmen_, 1820, i, 239, 240; cp. Furnivall and Simpson in

the latter's _School of Shakespeare_, 1878, i, pp. x, 32-40; and

see Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 12, as to the

contemporary lack of commercial enterprise.) Cecil, in his

opposition to the war policy of Essex, remarkably anticipates the

view of rational historical science (see Camden's _Annales_, ed.

1717, iii, 770-71, as to the conflict.) Burghley had equally been

the resisting force to the popular desire for an attack on France

after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His remarkable hostility to

militarism is set forth in his _Advice_ to his son, on the head of

the training to be given to his children: "Neither, by my consent,

shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to

live by that profession can hardly be an honest man or a good

Christian." Yet he planned well enough against the Armada. Cp.

Creighton, _Queen Elizabeth_, pp. 236, 237.

Sec. 10

The culture history of the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare is perhaps

clearer than the political. It is in the first great lull of the Wars of

the Roses, under Edward IV, that we find printing established in

England. Original literature had virtually died out, as in northern

Europe, in the long stress of physical strife; but the love of reading

took a new growth when peace intervened, and a printer found a public

for reproductions of the literatures of the past. This culture proceeded

under Henry VII, till at the advent of Henry VIII there was a mature

movement of scholarship, a product of classical study and reflection,

yielding for England the singular and memorable fruit of More's

_Utopia_. That was truly a "Pallas of the brain," not "wild" as in the

phrase of the conservative poet, but well-nigh pure of the blind passion

of normal life,[1086] and therefore no more than a radiant vision for an

age in which blind passion was still plenipotent. More's mind had

ripened as it were independently of his temperament; and his life is the

tragedy of an intelligence, more haunting and more profoundly

instructive than any _Hamlet_. The serene spirit that dreamed and

planned the _Utopia_ grew to be capable of a bitterness of dogmatic

fanaticism on a level with the normal passions of the time.[1087] It is

matter for surprise that he has not ere now been studied or cited as an

apparition of the "Celtic" mind on the arena of brutal English

life,[1088] a prematurely penetrating intelligence thrust back upon and

enveloped by a temperament kept passionate by the shocks of an animal

environment. From his eyes, limned by the great Holbein, there looks out

the sadness of flawed and frustrate wisdom; even as blood and passion

and fleshly madness are written in the beastlike face of the king, whose

little son, ruddy and hardy in his babyhood, pales and pines away

through portrait after portrait to puberty and death, the victim of some

secret malady.

Neither on the psychological line of More nor on that of Henry could the

national culture proceed. It went on naively, being for long neither

Puritan nor anti-Puritan, though the loquacious and commonplace

utterance of preachers already abounded before the accession of

Elizabeth. The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter

of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is

more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth

than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to

be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered

forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit;

the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were

being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to

new exercises of mind and speech; the swarming life of the capital

raised the theatre to fecund energy in a generation; and transformed

feudalism survived in the guise rather of a guardian to art and letters

than of organised class oppression. A new economic factor, conditioned

by a new resource, was at work. In More's day there was no such thing as

a professional writer, and there were few printed books. The great

controversy between Protestants and Catholics gave a new and powerful

stimulus to printing, and printing in turn invited literary effort,

books finding multiplying purchasers. Then came the growth of the new

theatre, an apparent means of livelihood to a crowd of poet-dramatists.

No such sudden outcrop of manifold literature had ever before occurred

in human history; the mental distance between Elyot and Bacon, between

the old interludes and Shakespeare, is as great as that between Hesiod

and Euripides. But the secret of continuous progress had not yet been

found: it lies, if anywhere, with the science of the future: and the

development after the reign of Elizabeth necessarily began to take new

lines.

The later profusion of the poetic drama was the profusion of decay.

Artistic abundance must mean artistic change or deterioration; but in

the drama there was no recasting of the artistic formulas, no refining

of the artistic sense, because there was no progress in general culture

sufficient to force or educe it. Rather the extraordinary eloquence of

the earlier and greater dramatists, and in particular of the greatest,

bred a cultus of conventional rhetoric and declamation in which the

power and passion of the masters were lost. Powerful men could not go on

attending to an infinity of such blank-verse dramas; powerful men could

not go on producing dramas, because the mind of the time made no

progress complementary to the great flowering of the Elizabethan peace.

That was essentially a late rebirth of the classic or bookish culture of

the Renaissance. New germinal ideas, apart from those of religion, were

yet to come. Already the spell of Bibliolatry was conquering the average

intelligence, unprepared to digest Hebraism as the _elite_ of the

previous generation had digested classicism; and the Protestant

principle led the Protestant peoples in the mass into the very attitude

needed for a social hypnotism such as that of Jewry, the fatal exemplar.

Bibliolatry is the culture of the ignorant; church government, the

politics of the unenfranchised and the impractical; their conditions

exclude them from a truer culture and more vital political interests.

Already in Henry's time the newly-translated Scriptures were, to his

wrath, "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and

alehouse"; the very stress of his own personal rule being a main part of

the cause. Under the Protectorate of Somerset the gross rapacity of the

Protestant nobles identified the new Church with upper-class selfishness

as completely as the old had ever been; and the Norfolk revolt of 1549

avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the gentry. When that was stamped out

in massacre, the spirit of popular independence was broken, save in so

far as it could play in the new channel of personal religion and

ecclesiastical polemic, always being dug by the disputation of the new

clergy. And when in the reign of Mary crowds of Protestant refugees fled

to Geneva, of which the polity had already been introduced to the

students of Oxford by Peter Martyr, there was set up a fresh ferment of

Presbyterian theory among the educated class which the ecclesiastical

conditions under Elizabeth could not but foster. The new dramatic

literature and the new national life of anti-Spanish adventure kept it

all substantially in the background for another generation; but the lack

of progressive culture and the restriction of expansive enterprise at

length gave the forces of pietism the predominance. Thus, in ways in

which the historians of our literature and politics have but imperfectly

traced, the balance of the nation's intellectual activity shifted

towards the ground of religion and the ecclesiastical life. And only

this change of mental drift can account for the new energy of resistance

incurred by Charles when he took up with greater obstinacy the lines of

policy of his father, meddling with church practice and normal

government on the same autocratic principles. Religion and worship were

not the sole grounds of quarrel, but they commanded all the other

grounds.

The decadence of English poetic drama after the death of Shakespeare is

one of the themes which elicit illustrations of the snares of empirical

sociology. An able and original literary critic, Mr. G.C. Macaulay, at

the close of a very competent study on Francis Beaumont, has formulated

a theory of that decadence which calls for revision. He pronounces that

by 1615 "the impulse which had moved the older generation was ... almost

exhausted. This, as we have already seen, came in the form of an

enthusiastic patriotism, ennobling human life, so far at least as

Englishmen were concerned in it, and producing a united and national

interest in the representation of its problems and destiny" (_Francis

Beaumont_, 1883, p. 187).

Error here emerges at once. It was not national patriotism that evoked

either the pre-Shakespearean or the Shakespearean drama. The rude

foundations had been laid by many "interludes," by such homespun comedy

as _Ralph Roister Doister_, and by the stilted tragedy of _Ferrex and

Porrex_. The chronicle-plays of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, worked

over by Shakespeare, are far from being the best of the

pre-Shakespearean drama. Just after the Armada, Marlowe revealed his

powers, not in patriotic plays, but in _Tamburlaine_, followed by _The

Jew of Malta_, and _Faustus_. The best of the pre-Shakespearean plays on

English history was Marlowe's _Edward II_, in which there was and could

be no appeal to patriotic fervour. The best episode in _Edward III_

stands out entirely from the "patriotic" part, which is nearly

worthless. The superior episode is probably the work of Greene, whose

best complete play, _James IV_, turns on fictitious Scottish history,

and is only momentarily touched by patriotic feeling. Peele's _Edward I_

is inferior as a whole to his _David and Bethsabe_. Kyd made his

successes, literary or theatrical, with _The Spanish Tragedy_, _Arden of

Feversham_, and the original _Hamlet_. Shakespeare's best work, from the

start, is done not in the chronicle-plays but in his comedies, in his

Falstaff scenes, and in his tragedies, from _Romeo and Juliet_ onwards.

These had nothing to do with patriotism, enthusiastic or otherwise. And

_Henry V_, which had, is not a great play.

The chief florescence of Elizabethan drama is to be understood in the

light of economic causation; and the decline is to be understood

similarly. The rise of the London theatres, a process of expansion

following on the maintenance of separate companies of players by

noblemen and by the court, meant a means of livelihood for actors and

playwrights, and of profit for _entrepreneurs_. Greene and Peele, and

Kyd and Marlowe, and Jonson and Chapman, wrote not to evoke or respond

to national patriotism, but to provide plays that would sell and "draw."

The original genius of Marlowe stimulated the others, who nearly all

imitated him. _Orlando Furioso_, _Selimus_, _Alphonsus King of

Arragon_, _David and Bethsabe_, and even _The Battle of Alcazar_, have

nothing to do with patriotism; and the touches of that in _Friar Bacon

and Friar Bungay_ are subsidiary to the story. There is no extant play

on the Armada.

It is pure supererogation, then, to argue that "everything had been done

by the first Stuart king to cool down patriotism, and to diminish the

self-respect and pride of Englishmen; while at the same time, by his

insolent hitherto unheard-of (?) divine-right pretensions, he alarmed

them for their political liberties, and by his ecclesiastical policy he

exasperated theological controversy; thus contriving, both in politics

and in religion, to destroy unity and foster party spirit to an extent

which had been unknown for nearly half-a-century. The condition of

things," adds Mr. Macaulay, "was unfavourable to everything national,

and above all things to the national drama, which became rather the

amusement of the idle than the embodiment of a popular enthusiasm." Need

it be pointed out that all of Shakespeare's greatest work, after

_Hamlet_, which was anything but "national," was produced after the

accession of James? What had popular enthusiasm to do with _Othello_,

_Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _The Tempest_,

and _The Winter's Tale_?

The really explanatory factors are (1) the economic, (2) the trend of

popular culture. Shakespeare alone of the dramatists of his day made

anything like a good income; and he did so in virtue of being an actor

and a prudent partner in the proprietorship of his theatre. Kyd, Greene,

and Peele all died in misery; and Marlowe must have lived his short life

from hand to mouth. Jonson subsisted chiefly by his masques and by the

gifts of patrons, and by his own avowal was always poor. Chapman can

have fared no better. The concurrence of the abnormal genius of

Shakespeare with his gift of commercial management is one of the rarest

things in literary history: take that away, and the problem of the

"decadence" is seen to be merely part of the statement of the "rise."

When men of superior power, taught by the past, ceased to defy poverty

by writing for the theatre--and even the vogue of Fletcher and Massinger

represented no solid monetary success--plays could less than ever appeal

to the "serious" and sectarian sections of the London public. Popular

culture ran on the sterile lines of pietism, Puritanism, and the strifes

engendered between these and sacerdotalism. All this had begun long

before James, though he may have promoted the evolution. Literary art

perforce turned to other forms. A successful national war could no more

have regenerated the drama than the wars of Henry V could generate it.

There was plenty of "national enthusiasm" later, in the periods of

Marlborough and Chatham: there was no great drama; and the new fiction

had as little to do with patriotism as had Shakespeare's comedies and

tragedies. Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ was not inspired by his politics.

It is well to recognise, finally, that in the nature of things aesthetic,

every artistic convention must in time be "played out," the law of

variation involving deviations or recoils. Blank-verse drama is a

specially limited convention, which only great genius can vitalise. Even

in this connection, however, there is danger in _a priori_ theorising.

Mr. Macaulay quotes from Schlegel the generalisation that "in the

commencement of a degeneracy in the dramatic art, the spectators first

lose the capability of judging of a play as a whole"; hence "the harmony

of the composition, and the due proportion between all the various parts

is apt to be neglected, and the flagging interest is stimulated by

scenes of horror or strange and startling incidents." The implication is

that the Jacobean drama degenerated in this way. Again the facts are

opposed to the thesis. If we are to believe Shakespeare and Jonson and

Beaumont, the audiences never appreciated plays as wholes. Scenes of

"comic relief," utterly alien to the action, come in as early as

_Locrine_. Scenes of physical and moral horror, again, abound in the

pre-Shakespearean drama: in _The Spanish Tragedy_ and _Arden of

Feversham_, in _David and Bethsabe_, in _Titus Andronicus_ (a

pre-Shakespearean atrocity), in _Selimus_ and _Tancred and Gismunda_,

and _Alphonsus Emperor of Germany_ (a Greene-Peele play wrongly ascribed

to Chapman), they are multiplied _ad nauseam_. Rapes, assassinations,

incest, tearing-out of eyes and cutting-off of hands, the kissing of a

husband's excised heart by his wife, the unwitting eating of her

children's flesh by a mother, the dashing out of a child's brains by its

grandfather--such are among the flowers of the Elizabethan time. On

Schlegel's theory, there was degeneration before there was success.

Webster's "horrors" do not seem to have won him great vogue; and Ford's

neurotic products had no great popularity. Doubtless weak performers

tend to resort to violent devices; but they did so before Shakespeare;

and Shakespeare did not stick at trifles in _Lear_ and _Othello_.

Decadence in art-forms, in short, is to be studied like other forms of

decadence, in the light of the totality of conditions; and is not to be

explained in terms of itself. Mr. Macaulay's thesis as a whole might be

rebutted by simply citing the fact that the florescence of Spanish drama

at the hands of Lope de Vega and Calderon occurred in a period of

political decline, when "patriotic enthusiasm" had nothing to live upon.

Vega began play-writing just after the defeat of the Armada; and his

_Dragontea_, written in exultation over the death of Drake, is not a

memorable performance. Velasquez, like Calderon, flourished under Philip

IV, in a time of national depression and defeat.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 987: "The distinctive characteristics of the Saxon

race--talents for agriculture, navigation, and commerce" (T. Colley

Grattan, _The Netherlands_, 1830, p. 2).]

[Footnote 988: A.L. Smith, in _Social England_, i, 201, 202. When Alfred

built ships he had to get "Frisian pirates" to man them. It was clearly

the new agricultural facilities of England that turned the original

pirates into thorough landsmen. Cp. Dr. Cunningham, _Growth of English

Industry and Commerce_, 3rd ed. 1896, App. E. pp. 640, 641.]

[Footnote 989: H. Hall, in _Social England_, i, 464. Cp. ii, 101; Prof.

Ashley, _Introduction to English Economic History_, 1888-93, i, 111;

Hallam, _Middle Ages_, 11th ed. iii, 327; Schanz, _Englische

Handelspolitik_, 1889, i, 1. When the Jews were expelled by Edward I,

Lombards were installed in their place. Later, as we shall see, the

Hansards seem to have tutored natives up to the point of undertaking

their own commerce.]

[Footnote 990: Cp. A.L. Smith, as cited, p. 203.]

[Footnote 991: Seebohm, _The English Village Community_, 3rd ed. 1884,

pref. p. ix. Cp. Prof. Ashley, _Introduction to English Economic

History_, i, 13-16.]

[Footnote 992: Prof. Maitland, the most circumspect opponent of the

"serf" view, did not consider this when he asked (_Domesday Book and

Beyond_, ed. 1907, p. 222) how either the Saxon victors could in the

mass have sunk to serfdom or the conquered Britons, whose language had

disappeared, could be so numerous as to constitute the mass of the

population.]

[Footnote 993: That the serf or villein was not necessarily an abject

slave is noted by Kemble (_Saxons in England_, as cited, i, 213) and

Stubbs (_Const. Hist._ 4th ed. i, 466).]

[Footnote 994: Maitland, _Domesday Book_, pp. 43, 46.]

[Footnote 995: This seems a more probable etymology than the derivation

by spelling from _Knabe_.]

[Footnote 996: Cp. the Rev. G. Hill, _Some Consequences of the Norman

Conquest_, 1904, pp. 60-61.]

[Footnote 997: Green, _History_ (the longer), 1885, i, 79.]

[Footnote 998: Thierry, _Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre_, edit.

9e, 1851, i, 152-55; Duruy, _Hist. de France_, ed. 1880, i, 289.]

[Footnote 999: Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, 1907, pp. 3-5.]

[Footnote 1000: Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 116, 1-vol. ed. p. 351;

Stubbs, _Const. Hist._ i, 280; Sharon Turner, _History of England during

the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 213. "The princes who lived upon the worst

terms with their barons seem accordingly to have been the most liberal

in grants ... to their burghs." Adam Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, bk.

iii, ch. iii.]

[Footnote 1001: The Conqueror himself not only took pains to protect and

attach native freemen who accepted his rule, but sought to retain their

laws and usages. Cp. Stubbs, i, 281, 290, 298. The statement that he

aimed specially at the manumission of serfs (Sharon Turner, as last

cited, i, 135, 136) proceeds on a fabricated charter. That, however, is

not later than Henry I.]

[Footnote 1002: Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, bk. xiv, ch. i.]

[Footnote 1003: _E.g._ the rivalries of mendicant friars and secular

priests and monks, and of the different orders of monks and friars with

each other. Cp. Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ix, 145, 146, 155,

156; Sharon Turner, _History of England during the Middle Ages_, iii,

123-26, 137, etc. The strifes between popes and prelates are

innumerable, in all countries.]

[Footnote 1004: As to this see Dr. Cunningham, _Growth of English

Industry and Commerce_, 3rd ed. 1896, Appendix E. Cp. Green, _Short

History_, ch. ii, Sec. 6, p. 88.]

[Footnote 1005: As to which see Earle, _Philology of the English

Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 54-66.]

[Footnote 1006: This is explicitly admitted by Buckle (3-vol. ed. ii,

118; 1-vol. ed. p. 352), though he does not thereafter speak

consistently on the subject.]

[Footnote 1007: Cp. Buckle, as last cited; Green. _History_ (the

larger), 1885, i. 300.]

[Footnote 1008: Stubbs, iii, 606.]

[Footnote 1009: Karl Hegel notes (_Staedte und Gilden der germanischen

Voelker im Mittelalter_, pp. 33-34) that the Anglo-Saxon gilds seem to

have had no connection with towns or communes, and that their societies

might serve as a type for any class-association.]

[Footnote 1010: Cp. Green, _Short History_, ch. iv, Sec. 4, pp. 192, 193;

ch. vi, Sec. 3, p. 285; Prof. Ashley, _Introd. to English Economic

History_, 1888-93, i, 71, 75, 85, 87, 89; ii, 12, 14, 19, 49. Prof.

Ashley notes a great change for the better in the fifteenth century

(work cited, ii, 6), and a further advance in the sixteenth (ii, 42).]

[Footnote 1011: Cp. J.H. Round, _The Commune of London_, 1899, p. 224.]

[Footnote 1012: "After Crecy and Calais, Edward felt himself strong

enough to disregard the Commons.... His power was for the most part

great or small, as his foreign policy was successful or disastrous"

(Pearson, _English History in the Fourteenth Century_, pp. 224, 225).

See also Stubbs, iii, 608; and compare the case of Henry V.]

[Footnote 1013: Cp. Prof. Ashley, i, 88.]

[Footnote 1014: As to Flemish influence on early English progress, see

Prof. Thorold Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History of England_,

1892, pp. 10, 11, 301-303.]

[Footnote 1015: Hallam. _Middle Ages_, iii. 321, 322.]

[Footnote 1016: Gardiner, _Student's History of England_, p. 69; Gneist,

as cited above, p. 376. Cp. Gardiner's _Introduction to the Study of

English History_, p. 91: "Even the House of Commons, which was pushing

its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The

labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation.

Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down

upon those beneath them without trust or affection." Magna Carta itself

was a protection only for "freemen."]

[Footnote 1017: Cp. Gibbins. _Industrial History of England_, pp. 36,

37; Pearson, _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_, ii,

378.]

[Footnote 1018: See Pearson's _English History in the Fourteenth

Century_, pp. 23, 228, 253, etc.; cp. p. 225. In the thirteenth century

Frederick II had enfranchised all the serfs on his own domains (Milman,

_Latin Christianity_, vi, 153); and a similar policy had become general

in the Italian cities. Louis VI and Louis VII of France had even

enfranchised many of their serfs in the twelfth century, and Louis X

carried out the policy in 1315. Cp. Duruy, _Hist. de France_, i, 291,

_note_. England in these matters was not forward, but backward.]

[Footnote 1019: Froissart, liv. ii, ch. 106, ed. Buchon, 1837. The

southern counties, however, were perhaps then as now less democratic,

less "free," than the northern.]

[Footnote 1020: Compare Mackintosh's rhetoric as to Magna Carta

constituting "the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind"

(_History of England_, 1830, i, 222), and as to Simon de Montfort, whom

he credits with inventing the idea of representation in Parliament for

cities (p. 238).]

[Footnote 1021: Duruy, _Hist. de France_, i, 289.]

[Footnote 1022: Cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'histoire de France_, 7e edit.

p. 322.]

[Footnote 1023: This had, however, been employed as early as 1246.]

[Footnote 1024: Cp. Pearson, as last cited, p. 8.]

[Footnote 1025: As to what traffic actually took place in the Dark Ages,

cp. Heyd, _Histoire du commerce de Levant_, Fr. tr. 1886, i, 94-99.]

[Footnote 1026: Cox, _The Crusades_, p. 146.]

[Footnote 1027: Pignotti, _History of Tuscany_, Eng. trans. 1823, iii,

256-62.]

[Footnote 1028: _Hist. de la Civ. en France_, ed. 13e, iii, 6e lecon.]

[Footnote 1029: Down even to the points of chastity and "training."]

[Footnote 1030: This is now pretty generally recognised. Among recent

writers compare Green, _Short History_, ch. iv, Sec. 3; Pearson, as last

cited, p. 220; Gardiner, _Student's History of England_, p. 235; and

_Introduction to the Study of English History_, p. 91. See also Buckle,

3-vol. ed. ii, 133; 1-vol. ed. p. 362. The sentimental view is still

extravagantly expressed by Ducoudray, _Histoire sommaire de la

civilisation_, 1886.]

[Footnote 1031: Pignotti, as cited, iii, 279; G. Villani, _Cronica_,

xii, 54-56.]

[Footnote 1032: Cp. Thierry, _Histoire de la Conquete_, iv, 210. As

Thierry notes (p. 247), John Ball's English is much less Gallicised than

that which became the literary tongue.]

[Footnote 1033: "Depuis les dominateurs de l'Orient jusqu'aux maitres de

Rome asservie ... quiconque detient la liberte d'autrui dans la

servitude, perd la sienne...." (Morin, _Origines de la democratie_, pp.

137-38).]

[Footnote 1034: Cp. Busch, _England unter den Tudors_, 1892, i, 6.]

[Footnote 1035: Stubbs, _Const. Hist._, iii, 632, 633; Busch, _England

unter den Tudors_, i, 81; Green, ch. vi, Sec. 3, pp. 267, 268, 287, 288.]

[Footnote 1036: Cp. Gardiner, _Student's History_, p. 330.]

[Footnote 1037: The clergy and the Parliament seem to have applauded the

project of an invasion of France instantly and without reservation

(Sharon Turner, _History of England during the Middle Ages_, ii, 383).

And already in the minority of Henry VI "the Parliament was fast dying

down into a mere representation of the baronage and the great

landowners" (Green, ch. vi, p. 265). "Never before and never again for

more than two hundred years were the Commons so strong as they were

under Henry IV" (Stubbs, iii, 73).]

[Footnote 1038: Pearson, _English History in the Fourteenth Century_,

pp. 250, 251. Among the minor forms of oppression were local vetoes on

the grinding of the people's own corn by themselves in their handmills.

Thus "the tenants of St. Albans extorted a licence to use querns at the

time of Tyler's rebellion" (Morgan, _England under the Normans_, 1858,

p. 161).]

[Footnote 1039: As to the failure of these laws see Gasquet, _The Great

Pestilence_, 1893, p. 196 sq.]

[Footnote 1040: _Id._ p. 200.]

[Footnote 1041: Lewis's _Life of Wiclif_, ed. 1820, pp. 224, 225;

Lechler's _John Wycliffe and his English Precursors_, Eng. tr. 1-vol.

ed. pp. 371-76; Prof. Montagu Burrows, _Wiclif's Place in History_, p.

19.]

[Footnote 1042: Green, _Short History_, ch. v, Sec. 4; Gardiner,

_Introduction_, pp. 94-98; Rogers, _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p.

272.]

[Footnote 1043: Cp. Sharon Turner, _England during the Middle Ages_, ii,

263; iii, 108; Milman, _Latin Christianity_, viii, 213, 215.]

[Footnote 1044: Green, ch. v, Sec. 5, p. 255; Stubbs, iii, 609-10. He

further refused the petition from the Commons in 1391, demanding that no

"neif or villein" should be allowed to have his children educated. Cp.

de Montmorency, _State Intervention in English Education_, 1902, p. 27.]

[Footnote 1045: Green, p. 258; Stubbs, iii. 32. It is plain that among

the factious nobility, and even the courtiers, of the time there was a

strong disposition to plunder the Church (Stubbs, iii, 43, 48, 53).

Doubt is cast by Bishop Stubbs on Walsingham's story of the Lollard

petition of 1410 for the confiscation of the lands of bishops and

abbots, and the endowment therewith of 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,000

esquires, and 100 hospitals (Stubbs, iii, 65; cp. Milman, _Latin

Christianity_, viii, 214; ix, 17-18); but in any case many laymen leant

to such views, and the king's resistance was steadfast. Yet an

archbishop of York, a bishop, and an abbot successively rebelled against

him. On his hanging of the archbishop, see the remarkable professional

reflections of Bishop Stubbs (iii, 53).]

[Footnote 1046: Act 2 Hen. IV, c. 15. Cp. de Montmorency, _State

Intervention in English Education_, 1902, p. 36.]

[Footnote 1047: Stubbs, iii, 626; de Montmorency, p. 29; Act 7 Hen. IV,

c. 17.]

[Footnote 1048: Schanz (_Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 349, 350) decides

that the middle class was the only one which gained. The lower fared as

ill as the upper. Cp. Stubbs, iii, 610.]

[Footnote 1049: Hallam (_Constitutional History_, 10th ed. 1, 10) doubts

whether Henry VII carried the power of the Crown much beyond the point

reached by Edward. Busch, who substantially agrees (_England unter den

Tudors_, i, 8, _note_), misreads Hallam in criticising him, overlooking

the "much." Edward had so incensed the London traders by his exactions

that it was by way of undertaking to redress these and similar

grievances that Richard III ingratiated himself (Green, pp. 293-94).]

[Footnote 1050: Cp. Green, pp. 285-86.]

[Footnote 1051: Stubbs, iii, 283; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 326, 328;

Green, ch. vi, Sec. 3, p. 282. This, however, did not mean the maintenance

of English shipping, which declined. See Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; and cp.

Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry_, Sec. 121. "France seems to have

had a considerable share of foreign commerce near a century before

England was distinguished as a commercial country" (Adam Smith, _Wealth

of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iv). Yet fishing and seafaring ranked as the

main national industries (Busch, _England unter den Tudors_, i, 251).]

[Footnote 1052: See Stubbs, i, 675, as to the large foreign element in

the London population, apart from the Hansa factory; and cp. Ashley,

_Introd. to Economic History_, ii, 209.]

[Footnote 1053: The fact that the Scandinavian kings were eager to

damage the Hansa by encouraging English and Dutch traders would be a

special stimulus.]

[Footnote 1054: Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,

i, 392.]

[Footnote 1055: Busch, _England unter den Tudors_, i, 250-65. Edward had

actually traded extensively on his own account, freighting ships to the

Mediterranean with tin, wool, and cloth Green, p. 287; Henry, _History

of Great Britain_, ed. 1823, xii, 309, 315-16; Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10;

Hall's _Chronicle_, under Henry VII.]

[Footnote 1056: Green, p. 295.]

[Footnote 1057: "Something like a fifth of the actual land in the

kingdom was ... transferred from the holding of the Church to that of

nobles and gentry" (Green, ch. vii, Sec. 1, p. 342).]

[Footnote 1058: Cp. E. Armstrong, _Introduction_ to Martin Hume's

_Spain_, 1898, pp. 13, 19, 29; Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and

Isabella_, pt. i, ch. vi, _end_; Hallam, _Middle Ages_, iii, 331.]

[Footnote 1059: See Stubbs, iii, 626-28, as to the extent to which

ability to read was spread among the common people. As to the general

effect on mental life see the vigorous though uncritical panegyric of

Hazlitt, _Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_, ed. 1870,

pp. 12-17.]

[Footnote 1060: As to the democratic element in Calvinism, which

develops from Lollardism, see the interesting remarks of Buckle, 3-vol.

ed. ii, 339; 1-vol. ed. p. 481. Prof. Gardiner sums up (_Introduction to

the Study of English History_, pp. 97, 98) "that as soon as Lollardism

ceased to be fostered by the indignation of the labouring class against

its oppressors, it dwindled away." Compare the conclusions of Prof.

Thorold Rogers, _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 272, and see

above, p. 390. Prof. Rogers (p. 273) traces the success of the

Reformation in the Eastern counties to the long work of Lollardism

there. In the same district lay the chief strength of the Rebellion.

Compare his _Economic Interpretation of History_, pp. 79-91.]

[Footnote 1061: Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed. 1893, i,

45.]

[Footnote 1062: Cp. Pulszky, _The Theory of Law and Civil Society_, p.

206. "Theocracy in itself, being the hierarchical rule of a priestly

class, is but a species of aristocracy." And see Buckle's chapter, "An

Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Seventeenth Century"

(3-vol. ed. iii, 211, 212; 1-vol. ed. pp. 752-53; and notes 36, 37, 38)

for the express claims of the Scotch clergy to give out "the whole

counsel of God."]

[Footnote 1063: Dr. Gardiner writes:--"Nor was it indifference alone

which kept these powerful men aloof; they had an instinctive feeling

that the system to which they owed their high position was doomed, and

that it was from the influence which the preachers were acquiring that

immediate danger was to be apprehended to their own position" (last

cit.). One is at a loss to infer how the historian can know of or prove

the existence of such an instinct.]

[Footnote 1064: In her partialities she was fully as ill-judging as Mary

of Scotland. To the eye of the Spanish ambassador Dudley was "heartless,

spiritless, treacherous, and false" (Bishop Creighton, _Queen

Elizabeth_, ed. 1899, p. 65). Essex in turn was a furious fool.]

[Footnote 1065: As to the change in English feeling between 1580, when

the Catholic missionaries were widely welcomed, and the years after

1588, see _The Dynamics of Religion_, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.). Cp.

Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed. 1893, i, 15: "Every threat

uttered by a Spanish ambassador rallied to the national government

hundreds who in quieter times would have looked with little satisfaction

on the changed ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church."]

[Footnote 1066: Cp. Motley, _History of the United Netherlands_, 1867,

i, 391 _sq._]

[Footnote 1067: In his _Introduction to the Study of English History_

(1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of

Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once

mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that

"the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary

beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the

consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and

vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from

the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that

the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually

made out.]

[Footnote 1068: "There was no truth nor honesty in anything she said"

(Bishop Creighton, _Queen Elizabeth_, p. 60; cp. pp. 76, 91, 112, 181,

216, 228-31).]

[Footnote 1069: Her practice of leaving her truest servants to bear

their own outlays in her service, begun with Cecil (Creighton, p. 63),

was copied from Charles V and Philip II, but was carried farther by her

than ever by them. All the while she heaped gifts on her favourites.]

[Footnote 1070: _E.g._, Mr. Gibbins's _Industrial History of England_,

pp. 84-89, 105. The point of view seems to have been set up by Cobbett's

_History of the Reformation_.]

[Footnote 1071: Cp. Ashley, _Introd. to Economic History_, ii, 312-15.]

[Footnote 1072: Cp. More's _Utopia_, bk. i (Arber's ed. p. 41; Morley's,

p. 64); and Bacon's _History of Henry VII_, Bohn ed. p. 369. More

expressly charges certain Abbots with a share in the process of

eviction.]

[Footnote 1073: Cp. Green, ch. vi, Sec. 3. Green goes on to speak of the

earlier Statutes of Labourers as setting up the "terrible heritage of a

pauper class" (p. 286, also p. 250). This is a fresh error of the same

sort as that above dealt with. A pauper class was inevitable, whatever

laws were made.]

[Footnote 1074: Bishop Stubbs puts it (iii, 283) that the increase of

commerce during the Wars of the Roses was "to some extent a refuge for

exhausted families, and a safety-valve for energies shut out of their

proper sphere." The proposition in this form is obscure.]

[Footnote 1075: On this see Stubbs, ch. xxi, Sec.Sec. 470, 471.]

[Footnote 1076: Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 12, preamble, and c. 19.]

[Footnote 1077: Cp. Moreton on _Civilisation_, 1836, p. 106; Cunningham,

_English Industry_, i, 392.]

[Footnote 1078: Cp. Cliffe Leslie, _Essays in Political and Moral

Philosophy_, p. 267; Toynbee, _The Industrial Revolution_, pp. 63, 66;

Gibbon's _Memoirs_, beginning.]

[Footnote 1079: Gardiner, _Introd. to Eng. Hist._ 1881, p. 118;

Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i, 434.]

[Footnote 1080: Rogers, _Story of Holland_, p. 217, and _Six Centuries_,

p. 184; W.T. McCullagh's _Industrial History of the Free Nations_, 1846,

ii, 42, 272; Gibbins, pp. 104, 109.]

[Footnote 1081: Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, iv, 106,

108, citing Acts 6 Hen. VIII, c. 6, and 32 Hen. VIII, cc. 18, 19.]

[Footnote 1082: It is in the prologue to Act v, 11. 30-34. I affirm

without hesitation that the prologues to all five Acts are

non-Shakespearean, and plainly by one other hand. Compare the chorus

prologues to Dekker's _Old Fortunatus_, which are in exactly the same

style. In the latest biography, however (Lee's, p. 174), there is no

recognition of any such possibility. It is surprising that Steevens and

Ritson, who pronounced the prologue to _Troilus and Cressida_

non-Shakespearean, should not have suspected those to _Henry V_, which

are so signally similar in style. Dekker's connection with _Troilus and

Cressida_ is indicated by Henslowe's Diary. The style is a nearly

decisive clue to his authorship of the _Henry V_ prologues.]

[Footnote 1083: Lee's _Life_, pp. 175, 176.]

[Footnote 1084: A theory of this is suggested in the author's _Montaigne

and Shakespeare_.]

[Footnote 1085: Cp. Froude, _History of England_, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507,

508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser's _View of the Present State of Ireland_,

Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky's _History of Ireland in the

Eighteenth Century_, i, 8; Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-42_, ed.

1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox, _Key to the Irish Question_,

1890, ch. xxix; and the author's _The Saxon and the Celt_, pp. 148-54.]

[Footnote 1086: Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, Sec.

4, p. 311.]

[Footnote 1087: See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character

of Sir Thomas More," in the _Amenities of Literature_.]

[Footnote 1088: Compared with Henry VIII, More might be pronounced a

specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry

seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!]

CHAPTER II

THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH

Sec. 1

Nearly all the conceivable materials of disaffection, save personal

misconduct on the king's part,[1089] went to prepare the Great

Rebellion. Religious antipathies, indeed, no longer rested on the naked

ground of lands taken and in danger of being re-taken;[1090] but there

had been developed an intense animus of Protestant against Catholic, the

instinct of strife running the more violently in that channel because so

few others were open, relatively to the store of restless brute force in

the country. Perhaps, indeed, Presbyterians hated Episcopalians and

Arminians, at bottom, nearly as much as they did Catholics; but the

chronic panics, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, the mythology of the

Marian period, and the story of the massacres of Alva and of St.

Bartholomew's Day, served to unite Protestants in this one point of

anti-Papalism, and had set up as it were a new human passion in the

sphere of English politics. And to this passion James and Charles in

turn ran counter with an infatuated persistence. James, who was so much

more annoyed by Puritans than by Papists, planned for his son, with an

eye to a dowry, the Spanish marriage, which of all possible matches

would most offend the English people; and when that fell through,

another Catholic bride was found in the daughter of the King of France.

The pledges, so natural in the circumstances, to "tolerate" Catholics

in England, were a standing ground of panic to the intolerant

Protestants, even though unfulfilled; and the new king stood in the

sinister position of sheltering in his household the religion for which

he dared not claim freedom in the country. Such a ground of unpopularity

could be balanced only by some signal grounds of favour; but James and

Charles alike chose unpopular grounds of war, and failed badly to boot.

To crown all, they exhibited to the full the hereditary unwisdom of

their dynasty in the choice of favourites;[1091] and the almost

unexampled animosity incurred by Buckingham could not but reflect

somewhat towards Charles, whose refined and artistic tastes, besides,

made him the natural enemy of the text-worshipping and mostly art-hating

Puritans.

Thus everything made for friction between king and subjects; and when

Charles, to raise necessary funds, resorted to measures of no abnormal

oppressiveness as compared with those of the Tudors, he was doggedly

resisted by Parliaments professedly standing on law, but really actuated

by a fixed suspicion of all his aims. Teeth were on edge all round. When

a merchant, mulcted in a heavy customs duty, happened to be a Puritan,

he resisted with a special zest; and one such declared before the Privy

Council that "in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the

merchants so screwed and wrung as in England."[1092] The King, unhappily

for himself, conciliated nobody. Not content with alienating nobles by

imposing huge fines in revival of the forest laws, he incensed the

Corporation of London by confiscating their estates in Ulster, conferred

by his father, and levying a fine of L70,000 to boot, for alleged

breaches of Charter.[1093] Besides selling many trade monopolies, he

passed vexatious sumptuary laws, fixing the prices of poultry, butter,

and coals, and insisting on the incorporation of all tradesmen and

artificers.[1094] The friction was well-nigh universal; and but for the

remarkable prosperity built up by the long peace,[1095] the trouble

might have come much sooner. But it is idle to keep up the pretence that

what was at stake was the principle of freedom. The first demand of the

Parliamentary Opposition was for the more thorough persecution of the

Catholics. Parliamentarians such as Eliot were more oppressive in

religious matters than Laud himself. He sought only uniformity of

worship, they uniformity of doctrine; and they punished for heresy more

unpardonably than did the Star Chamber for gross libel.

See Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-1642_, small ed. v, 191, as

to Eliot's plans to fit out the fleet by means of "those penalties

the Papists have already incurred"--a proposal which, says Dr.

Gardiner, "if it had been translated into figures, would have

created a tyranny too monstrous to be contemplated with

equanimity." And Eliot was all for a persecution of the Arminians

(_id._ vii, 42-43). In 1645 the Corporation of London petitioned

Parliament to suppress "all sects without toleration."

Nor were they less oppressive in their fiscal policy. After beginning a

revolt against illegal taxation, Pym secured the imposition of taxes on

beverages (1643), on flesh, salt, textile goods, and many other

commodities, "at the sword's point," against the general resistance of

the people.[1096] There were at work a hundred motives of strife; and it

was only the preternatural ill-luck or unwisdom of Charles that united

Parliament against him so long. It needed all the infatuation of an

express training in the metaphysics of divine right to enable a king of

England, even after James I, to blunder through the immense network of

superstition that hedged him round; indeed, the very intensity of the

royalist superstition best explains the royal infatuation. So fixed was

the monarchic principle in the minds of the people, who, then as later,

swore by monarchy but hated paying for it, that in the earlier years of

the struggle not even the zealots could have dreamt of the end that was

to be. Regicide entered no man's mind, even as a nightmare.

Sec. 2

On Charles, as the greatest "architect of ruin" in English political

history, psychological interest fastens with only less intensity than on

his great antagonist. The astonishing triple portrait by Vandyke

reveals, with an audacity that is positively startling when we think of

the other effigies by the same artist, a character stamped at once with

impotence and untruth. One slight suggestion of strength lies in the

look of grave self-esteem--a quality which would in Charles be fostered

from the first by his refined revolt from the undignified ways of his

father; but it is withal the very countenance of duplicity. Puritan

prejudice could not exaggerate the testimony of the daring artist. We

seem to understand at once how he deceived and alienated Holland and

Spain as well as the parties among his own subjects. And it was the very

excess of duplicity, or rather the fatal combination of duplicity with

infirmity of purpose,[1097] that destroyed the man. As the war wore on,

and above all after it was closed, the discords of the Parliament and

the army were such that the most ordinary practical sagacity could have

turned them to the triumph of the king's cause. This is the most

instructive phase of the Rebellion. The Presbyterian majority which had

grown up in Parliament--a growth still imperfectly elucidated--represented

only one of the great warring sects of the day; and if, after

Independency, led by Cromwell, had come to daggers drawn with the despots

of the Commons, Charles had only agreed to any working settlement

whatever, he might with perfect confidence have left the conflicting

forces to throttle each other afterwards. Any arrangement he might have

made, whether with the Presbyterians or with Cromwell, would

have broken down of itself, and he might have set up his own polity in

the end. But he so enjoyed his intrigues, as it were indemnifying

himself by them for his weakness of will, that he thought to triumph by

them alone, and would not wait for the slower chemistry of normal

political development; so that the Independents, driven desperate by his

deceits, had to execute him in self-preservation.

Sec. 3

As it was, the history of the Rebellion remains none the less the

tragi-comedy of the old constitutionalism. Parliament, resisting as

illegal the supremacy of the king, went from one illegality to another

in resisting him, till his tyrannies became trivial in comparison. And

Cromwell, who must have set out with convictions about the sanctity of

law, although doubtless fundamentally moved by the all-pervading fear of

Popery, was led by an ironical fate, step by step, into a series of

political crimes which, if those of Charles deserved beheading, could be

coped with only in the medieval hell.

Cp. Hallam, ii, 252; and Cowley's _Essays_, ed. 1868, p. 139 _et

seq._ To say nothing of Cromwell's illegal exactions, his selling

of at least fifty Englishmen into slavery in the West Indies (on

which see Cowley, p. 168; Hallam, ii, 271, _note_; and Carlyle,

_Letters and Speeches_, ed. 1857, iii, 100--where the victims are

put at "hundreds")--albeit no worse than the similar selling of

Irish and Scotch prisoners--was an act which, if committed earlier

by any king, would have covered his name with historical infamy.

Prof. Firth points out that the practice began under James I, but

it was then applied only to felons and vagrants. Cromwell's example

was followed under Charles II with regard to the Covenanting rebels

in Scotland; and the plan was again followed in the cases of

Monmouth's rebellion and that of 1715. (Cited in note on Lomas's

ed. of Carlyle's _Cromwell_, ii, 438.) As regards Ireland, the

selling of prisoners into slavery was not restricted to the case of

the survivors of Drogheda (Carlyle's _Cromwell_, as cited, ii, 53;

ed. Lomas, i, 469). It is proved that Cromwell's agents captured

not only youths, but girls, for export to the West Indies

(Prendergast, _The Cromwellian Settlement_, 2nd ed. p. 89); and

that the slavery there was of the cruellest sort (Cunningham,

_Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, ii, 109), though it has

to be kept in view that it was not perpetual; the victim being

strictly an "indentured labourer," only for a certain number of

years at the mercy of his owner (Gardiner, _Commonwealth and

Protectorate_, small ed. iii, 309-10, _note_; iv, 111-13). Of

course the limitation of the term made the servitude all the more

severe (Lomas's note cited).

In the end, the Protector terrorised his own law courts as Charles

had never dared to do. See Clarendon, bk. xv, ed. Oxford, 1843, p.

862, and Hallam, ii, 253, 271, 272, _note_. Cromwell's language, as

recorded by Clarendon, would startle some of his admirers by its

indecency if they took the trouble to read the passage. Cp.

Vaughan, _Hist. of England under the Stuarts_, etc., p. 524 (citing

Whitelocke and Ludlow), as to the law courts. Vaughan overlooks the

selling of royalists as slaves.

It was small wonder that posterity came to canonise the king; for in

terms even of the Roundhead principles of impeachment he was a political

saint in comparison with the "usurper." And royalists might well imagine

Cromwell as haunted by remorse; for nothing short of the "besotted

fanaticism" of which, as Hallam pronounces, he had sucked the dregs,

could keep him self-complacent over the retrospect of the Civil War when

he was governing by the major-generals, after failing to govern with

farcically packed Parliaments. His fanaticism was, of course, in the

ratio of his will-power, but each supported the other. The modern

exaltation of his character, as against the earlier and rather saner

habit of crediting him with great powers, relatively high purposes, and

great misdeeds,[1098] has tended to throw in the shade the blazing

lesson of his career, which is that, like most of his colleagues, he had

set out with no political insight or foresight whatever. His

conscientious beginnings are so utterly at issue with his endings that

it is indeed almost superfluous to condemn either--as superfluous as to

denounce the infatuation of Charles. But it is of importance to remember

that his very success as a Carlylean ruler only emphasises the failure

of his original politics. He succeeded by way of repudiating nearly

every principle on behalf of which he had taken up arms. Even apart from

the invigorating spectacle of his executive genius,[1099] he may well

stir our sympathy, which is more subtly and deeply exercised by his

inner tragedy, by the deadliness of his success in the light of his

aims, than by the simpler ill-fortune of Charles. But as politicians our

business is not to divide our sympathies between the powerful pietist

who was forced to give the lie to his life to save it, and the weak liar

who lost his life because he was at bottom faithful to his life's creed.

The superiority of Cromwell in strength of will and in administrative

faculty is too glaring to need acknowledging; and the lesson that a

strong man can tyrannise grossly where a weak man cannot tyrannise

trivially, is not one that particularly needs pressing. What it is

essential to note is that the course of events which forced and led

Cromwell into despotism was for the next generation a strong argument

against free Parliamentary government.

Our generation, proceeding mainly on the work of Carlyle, who never

really elucidates or even seeks to comprehend political and social

developments, has in large part lost sight of the fact that Cromwell was

more and more clearly becoming a military despot; and that with twenty

more years of life he might have established a new military and naval

empire. Yet at the time of his death his financial position was that of

a military adventurer at his wits' end, and his unscrupulous attack on

Spain was plainly planned by way of coming at money.[1100] Dr. Gardiner,

who has been the first English[1101] historian to handle the case with

comprehensive insight, rightly compares the position of Cromwell with

that of Napoleon. He was in fact just another sample of the recurrent

type of the military ruler establishing himself as despot on the ruins

of faction. "Except for four months ... the whole of the Protectorate

was a time either of war or of active preparation for war; and even

during those months the Protector was hesitating, not whether he should

keep the peace or not, but merely what enemy he should attack."[1102]

Finally he made war on Spain, by the admission of the friendly

historian, "after the fashion of a midnight conspirator," deceiving the

other side in order to gain a mean advantage.[1103] To such a policy

there was no limit in national conscience, any more than in his. He had

a standing army of 57,000 men, an immense force for the England of that

day; his revenue stood at two millions and a quarter, nearly four times

the figure of twenty years before; and still he was in desperate

financial straits, his outlays being nearly half a million in excess of

the income.[1104] The result was "a war for material gains"; and it

consists with all we know of history to say that with continued success

in such undertakings during a lengthened life he would have won the mass

of his countrymen to his allegiance.

A few dates and details make the process dramatically clear. Admiral

Blake won his first notable victory over Van Tromp in February, 1653;

and in April Cromwell felt himself in a position to expel the

recalcitrant Parliament, though that had always specially favoured the

navy. In this act he had the general approval of the people;[1105] but

he took care to change some of the naval commanders.[1106] The next

Parliament was the nominated one called the "Barebones," wherein none

were elected, and which went to pieces in the strife of its factions,

since even nomination could not secure concord among Puritans. Then came

the Parliament of 1654, elected from purged constituencies. From this

were excluded a hundred members who refused to sign an engagement not to

alter the system in force; and finally the remnant was angrily

dissolved, and military rule established under the major-generals. Yet

again, in 1656, driven by need of money, the Protector called another

packed Parliament, from which he nevertheless lawlessly excluded 102

elected members; and on their protesting there was a distinct increase

of the already obvious public displeasure at such repeated acts of

tyranny. This was in September; but in October came the news of

Stayner's capture of the Spanish treasure-ships; and in November the

treasure arrived--what the naval officers had left of it. On this the

Parliament promptly voted everything that its master asked for;[1107]

new taxes were laid to carry on the wanton war with Spain; and in

January 1657 it was proposed to offer him the Crown. Yet when, after a

six months' adjournment, that Parliament debated points on which he

wanted submission, he furiously dissolved it as he had done its

predecessors.

Such is the process of imperialism. With a few more years of ostensibly

profitable conquest, Cromwell, acclaimed and urged on in the career of

aggression by such different types of poet as Waller[1108] and

Marvell,[1109] would as a matter of course have been made king, with the

final consent of the army, and would have ruled as the crowned

imperator. In that case his Puritanism, instead of putting any

conscientious check on his egoism, would have fed it as Mohammed's faith

did his.[1110] Thus his early death was one of the important "accidents"

of history.[1111]

Sec. 4

As it was, Cromwell lived only long enough to create an intellectual as

well as a conservative reaction. Surprise has been sometimes expressed,

and must have been oftener felt, at the virtual High Toryism of the

doctrine of Hobbes,[1112] who was so little conservative in his general

habit of mind. The truth is that in 1651, or at least in 1660, the

monarchism of Hobbes was the ostensible Liberalism of the hour.

Parliamentarism had meant first sectarian tyranny, then anarchy, then

military despotism; and there was not the slightest prospect of a

parliamentary government which should mean religious or intellectual

freedom all round. Hobbes would infallibly have been at least thrown

into prison by the Long Parliament if in its earlier time of power he

had published his remarks on the Pentateuch. They punished for much

milder exercises of critical opinion. A strong monarchy was become, from

the point of view of many enlightened men, positively the best available

security for general freedom of life, at a time when the spirit of

religion had multiplied tenfold the normal impulses to social tyranny

and furnished the deepest channel of social ill-will compatible with

national unity. It lay in Christianity, as it lay earlier in Judaism, to

breed an intensity of religious strife such as the pagan world never

knew. Various countries had seen sects arise and grapple with each other

on the score of this or that interpretation of the Hebrew sacred books,

and men of conservative bias felt that they were face to face with

insane forces incompatible with a democratic system. Religious lore,

above all other learning, could make men more "excellently foolish," as

Hobbes put it, than was possible to mere ignorance, making new and

uncontrollable motives to disunion.

It is not to be assumed, indeed, that a revolution begun on any motive

whatever would have maintained itself at the then developed stage of

political intelligence; for the English people, which constantly accuses

others of lack of faculty for union, had never shown itself any better

fitted for rational compromise than the Irish, given conditions of equal

stress. Scandinavian, German, Dutch, English--all the Teutonic sections

alike had in all ages shown in the fullest degree the force of the

primary passions of self-assertion and mutual repulsion, cordially

uniting only, if at all, for purposes of aggression. But in the case

under notice it was the religious passions that dug the channels of

strife; and they must be held to have added to the volume of blind

emotion. Thus intensified, the principle had shown itself potent to

wreck any commonwealth; and there remained only the choice between a

usurper governing through an army and a "legitimate" monarch governing

as of old by way of Parliament and a civil service. Parliament had been

the most offensive tyrant of all, for while making most parade of

legality it had been the most self-seeking,[1113] and perhaps even the

least respectable as regards its _personnel_. The Liberals of the

latter time had their cue given to them by the memorable Falkland, who,

grievedly "ingeminating Peace, Peace," had recoiled from the intolerant

Puritans, and sadly joined the intolerant Royalists. Macaulay's thrust

at him for this,[1114] if technically just, was hardly seemly on the

critic's part, for Falkland represented exactly the temper of Macaulay's

own politics. He was an ideal Whig of the later school--the very saint

of moderation. Falkland had indeed special ground for withdrawal from

the Puritan party, in that he was convinced that Hampden and Pym had

deceived him as to the king's complicity in the Irish Rebellion and

other matters. He had been "persuaded to believe many things which he

had since found to be untrue."[1115] But in most things the Puritans

must have jarred on him.[1116] Where he had consented to go, albeit

deliberately to his death, as a Cavalier, his disciples might well

become theoretic monarchists when the whole torrent of public opinion

went for the Restoration.

Of course, the hope of social freedom was destined to frustration under

the restored monarchy just as before, since there was still no culture

force sufficient to purify the animal instinct of antagonism. The

Restoration only meant that the Episcopalian dog was uppermost and the

Nonconformist under. But all the same, Commonwealth principles were

profoundly discredited; and it is notable that never since has

Republican principle ostensibly regained in England the stature it had

reached in the hotbeds of the Great Rebellion and the Protectorate. The

long struggle against the king had educated many of the strivers into

democratism, as did the later struggle of the American colonies against

George III. Even in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell, after Republican

hopes had been so blasted, there were forty-seven avowed

Republicans,[1117] the remnant of the breed. With the return of the

monarchy it virtually disappears from English politics for a hundred and

thirty years;[1118] when again it rises for a moment in the hot air of

the French Revolution, only to disappear again for nearly another

century. It was after the Rebellion, and not before, that the dogma of

divine right became completely current orthodoxy in England.[1119]

Sec. 5

The collapse of Republicanism meant the collapse of the class politics

that had grown up in the war and in the Commonwealth alongside of the

creed politics. The creed politics itself, when carried to the lengths

of the doctrine of the Independents, meant a challenge to the political

system; and among the more advanced reasoners of the period were some

who saw that to put down kingly tyranny was of little avail while class

inequalities remained. The Long Parliament, though not going this

length, went far in the way of putting down some established abuses; and

there are many records of a more searching spirit of innovation. It is

important to realise that alike under Charles I and Cromwell the

Parliaments tended to be partly composed of and ruled by the more

audacious spirits of the time, simply because these had the advantage in

discussion wherever they were. The incapacity for speech which in later

times has made the Conservative party welcome adventurers as its

mouthpieces meant the partial obliteration of the conservative class in

the early days of unorganised parliamentary strife; and Cromwell's own

Parliaments baffled him in virtue of their large elements of upstart

intelligence. He himself, having entered the war from a mixture of

motives in which there was no idea of social reconstruction, was merely

irritated by the ideals of the more radical agitators, which he could

not out-argue, but on which he promptly put his foot. It is true that in

the immense ferment set up by the Rebellion impracticable ideas

abounded, and that they suggested risks of civil anarchy, even as the

multitude of sectaries threatened chaos in religion. We find indeed an

express affirmation of anarchism in the literature of the period;[1120]

and generally the English Revolution had in it most of the subversive

elements which later evolved the French, the determining difference

being that the English was not attacked from the outside. But there were

practical plans also. Lilburne had a really constructive scheme of

popular enfranchisement,[1121] which might have built up a democratic

force of resistance to royalism as such; but Cromwell, while ready to

overthrow any part of the constitution that hampered him, would build up

nothing in its place. He would have no alteration of the social

structure, save in so far as he must protect his Independents from the

Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. And of course, when his polity

fell, the ideals of the independents of politics--who had represented

only a tribe of scattered intelligences, much fewer than the mere

religious sectaries, who were themselves but a vigorous

minority--speedily disappeared from English affairs. The standards of

the average orthodox class became the standards of public life.

On the side of international relations, finally, Cromwell and the

Commonwealth did nothing to improve politics. Commerce began to spread

afresh; and commercial and racial jealousy, under the Puritan as later

under the Restoration rule, bred war with the Dutch, just as religious

hatreds had made war between England and Spain. The final proof of

Cromwell's lack of political wisdom is given in his utterly fantastic

scheme for a constitutional union of the English and Dutch republics, a

scheme which could not have worked for a week. When this proposal was

declined by the Dutch States-General, he seems to have been as ready as

any filibuster in England to go to war with the States;[1122] and it is

evident that the Navigation Act of 1651 was at once an act of revenge

for the insults put upon the English ambassadors by the Dutch Orangeist

populace, against the will of the Dutch Government, and a wanton effort

to punish the States for declining the Protector's absurd

proposals.[1123] The two Protestant republics thereupon grappled like

two worrying dogs; and for their first ostensible victory the English

Parliament publicly thanked God as unctuously as for any of the

victories of the Civil War.[1124] In their hands and Cromwell's

international politics sank at once to the normal levels of primitive

instinct.

Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Cromwell_, ch. xiii) glorifies Cromwell's

foreign policy on the score that it made England great in the eyes

of foreign countries. Exactly so might we eulogise the foreign

policy of Louis XIV or Philip II or Napoleon--so long as it

succeeded. Cromwell, up to the time when he began to scheme an

empire of naval aggression, simply aimed at a Protestant

combination as other rulers aimed at Catholic combinations. There

was nothing new in the idea; and it would have been astonishing if

he had _not_ maintained the naval power of the country. It was to

this very end that the luckless Charles imposed his ship-money,

which Hampden and his backers refused to pay. As regards home

politics, again, Mr. Harrison praises Cromwell for preserving order

with unprecedented success, making no allowance for the fact that

Cromwell was the first Englishman who governed through a standing

army, and making no attempt to refute Ludlow's statements (cited by

Hallam, ii, 251, _note_; cp. Vaughan, p. 524, _note_) as to the

gross tyranny of the major-generals, or to meet the charge against

Cromwell of selling scores of royalists into slavery at Barbadoes.

Mr. Harrison finally justifies Cromwell's policy in the main on the

score of "necessity," despite the proverbial quotation. It was

exactly on the plea of necessity that Charles justified himself in

his day, when Cromwell joined in resisting him. Mr. Harrison again

extols the "generosity" and "moral elevation" of the intervention

for the Vaudois, when on the same page he has to admit the infamy

of the Cromwellian treatment of Ireland. He sees no incongruity in

Milton's emotion over the "slaughtered saints" of Protestantism,

while Catholic ecclesiastics were with his approval being slain

like dogs. Moral and social science must hold the balances more

evenly than this.

Sec. 6

While thus showing that in his foreign relations in general he had no

higher principle than that which led him to protect the Protestant

Vaudois, Cromwell himself could not or would not tolerate Catholicism in

England. What was immeasurably worse, he had put thousands of Irish

Catholics to the sword, and reduced tens of thousands more to the life

conditions of wild animals. His policy in Ireland, if judged by the

standards we apply to the rule of other men, must be pronounced one of

blind brutality. He had helped to make a civil war in England because

his class was at times arbitrarily taxed, and had fears that its worship

would be interfered with; and in so doing he felt he had the support and

sanction of Omnipotence. When it came to dealing with Irishmen who stood

up for their race ideals and their religion, he acted as if for him

principles of moral and religious right did not exist.[1125] His most

ferocious deeds he justified by reference to the Ulster massacre of

1641, as if all Irishmen had been concerned in that, and as if the

previous English massacres had not been tenfold more bloody. Under his

own Government, by the calculation of Sir William Petty, out of a

population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the

sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. Of these, 504,000

were reckoned to be of Irish and 112,000 of English descent. And it was

planned to reduce the survivors to a life of utter destitution in

Connaught and Clare. By the settlement of 1653, ten of the thirty-two

Irish counties were allotted to the "Adventurers" who in 1641 had

advanced sums of money to aid in putting down the Irish Rebellion;

twelve were divided among Cromwell's soldiers; seven, with all the

cities and corporations of the kingdom, were reserved for the

Commonwealth; and three of the most barren counties--for the most part

unreclaimed--were left for the natives. The settlement could not be

carried out as planned by the Government, and as evidently desired by

Fleetwood, the Lord Deputy, and many of the officers. The very greed of

the soldiery defeated the project of a "universal transplantation," for

they were as eager for Irish labour as for Irish land.[1126] But the

confiscation of the land was carried out to the full, and multitudes

were forced into Connaught. The worst tyranny of Charles is thus as dust

in the balance with Cromwell's expropriation of myriads of conquered

Irish. For them he had neither the show of law nor the pretence of

equity. They were treated as conquered races had been treated, not by

the Romans, who normally sought to absorb in their polity the peoples

they overcame, but by barbarians in their mutual wars, where the loser

was driven to the wilderness. Far from seeking to grapple as a statesman

with the problem of Irish disaffection, he struck into it like a

Berserker, on the same inspiration of animal fury as took him into the

breach at Drogheda; and his or his officers' enactments, providing for

the slaughter of all natives who did not carry certificates of having

taken the anti-Royalist oath, are to be matched in history only with the

treatment of the conquered Slavs by the Christianising Germans in the

Dark Ages.

Dr. Gardiner and Mr. Harrison partly defend the massacre of

Drogheda as justified by the "laws of war" of the time. It is true

that for the period it was not very much out of the way. The

Royalist Manley, describing it, says only (_History of the

Rebellions_, 1691, p. 227): "I would not condemn the promiscuous

slaughter of the Citizens and Souldiers, of Cruelty, because it

might be intended for Example and Terror to others, _if the like

Barbarity had not been committed elsewhere_." But Manley seems to

have forgotten the friars, whose slaughter neither laws of war nor

European custom exonerated. There were really no "laws of war" in

the case. Dr. Gardiner (_Student's History_, p. 562; _Commonwealth

and Protectorate_, small ed. i, 118) puts it that these laws "left

garrisons refusing, as that of Drogheda had done, to surrender an

_indefensible_ post ... to the mercy or cruelty of the enemy." But

it is unwarrantable to call Drogheda an "indefensible post." Dr.

Gardiner's thesis that any captured post, however hard to take, is

_ipso facto_ proved to have been indefensible, may be dismissed as

a very bad sophism. Elsewhere he himself puts it (p. 132, _note_)

that men "defending a fortified town _after the defences had been

captured_" were liable to be slain--a very different thing.

Drogheda contained 3,000 foot, mostly English, "the flower of

Ormond's army," as Dr. Gardiner avows.

Mr. Harrison (_Oliver Cromwell_, p. 136) perhaps errs in saying

that its commander, Sir Arthur Aston, an officer of "great name and

experience ... at that time made little doubt of defending it

against all the power of Cromwell." Cp. Gardiner, _Com. and Prot._,

small ed. i, 128, as to Aston's straits. It had, however, actually

resisted siege by the Catholics for three years, and it was only by

desperate efforts that Cromwell carried it. He went into the breach

with the forlorn hope, and he gave the order for slaughter, as he

himself admits, in the fury of action. The first order, be it

observed, was to slay all "in arms _in the town_"--this at a time

when men commonly carried arms in time of peace, and members wore

their swords in Parliament. It simply meant a massacre of the male

inhabitants. The garrison was not so slaughtered: when the

surrender of the garrison came, Cromwell's blood-lust was slaked,

and he spared all but every tenth man--for slavery in the

Barbadoes. Nor did his men merely slay those taken in arms. He

tells that "their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously";

and it is impossible wholly to refuse to believe the royalist

statement of the time, that men, women, and children were

indiscriminately slaughtered. Dr. Gardiner, on somewhat

insufficient grounds (_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 135, 136,

_note_), entirely rejects the personal testimony of the brother of

Anthony a Wood (Anthony's _Autobiography_, ed. Oxford, 1848, pp.

51, 52) as to Cromwell's men holding up children as shields when

pursuing some soldiers of the garrison who defended themselves. Dr.

Gardiner is himself in error in respect of one charge of

improbability which he brings against the narrative, as quoted by

himself. But in any case his own narrative, as he evidently feels,

shows the Cromwellian troops to have been sufficiently ferocious.

Quarter was promised, and then withheld (Gardiner, i, 117, _note_,

118); and by Dr. Gardiner's own showing the "Parliamentary" account

itself avows that the final surrender of the defenders on the

"mount" was obtained by sheer treachery--a fact which Dr. Gardiner

gloses even while showing it. A Puritan drunk with the lust of

battle is a beast like any other. Cromwell himself had to quiet his

conscience with his usual drug of religion. But if this act had

been done by Cavaliers or Catholics upon a Puritan garrison and

Independent priests, he and his party would have held it up to

horror for ever.

The only defence he could make was that this was vengeance for the

great Irish Massacre--that is to say, that he had shown he could be

as bloody as the Irish, who on their part had all the English

massacres of the previous generation to avenge--a circumstance

carefully ignored by clerical writers who still justify Cromwell in

the name of Christianity, as seeking to make future massacres

impossible. All the while, there was not the slightest pretence of

showing that the garrison of Drogheda had been concerned in the old

massacre. Compare, on this, the emphatic verdict of Dr. Gardiner,

_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 139. Mr. Harrison (p. 145) quotes

Cromwell's challenge to opponents to show any instance of a man

"not in arms" being put to death with impunity--this after he had

avowed the slaughter of all priests and chaplains! His general

assertion of the scrupulousness of his party was palpably false;

and it is idle to say that he must have believed it true. That

Ireton's Puritan troops slew numbers of disarmed and unarmed Irish

with brutal cruelty and treachery _against Ireton's reiterated

orders_, is shown by Dr. Gardiner; and he tells how Ireton hanged a

girl who tried to escape from Limerick (_Commonwealth_, ii, 48,

53). Is it then to be supposed that Cromwell's men were more humane

when he was hounding them on to massacre? As to the further

slaughter of natives, there stands the assertion of Father French

(_Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of

Ireland_, Dublin, rep. 1846, p. 86) that under the Proclamation

which commanded the soldiers to slay any men met on the highway

without a certificate of having "taken the engagement" abjuring the

monarchy, "silly Peasants who out of Ignorance or want of care ...

left their tickets at home, were barbarously murdered." In the

circumstances the statement is only too credible.

There remains to be considered the old plea that the massacre of

Drogheda made an end of serious resistance, and so saved life. Thus

Carlyle: "Wexford Storm followed (not by forethought, it would

seem, but by chance of war) in the same fashion; and there was no

other storm or slaughter needed in that country" (_Cromwell_,

Comm. on Letter CV). This is one of Carlyle's innumerable

misstatements of fact. Even on his own view, the Wexford slaughter

had to follow that of Drogheda. But, as Gardiner shows, Cromwell's

bloodshed at Drogheda and Wexford, "so far from sparing effusion of

blood," though "successful at Ross and at a few lesser strongholds,

had only served to exasperate the garrisons of Duncannon, of

Kilkenny, and of Clonmel; and in his later movements Cromwell,

always prepared to accept the teaching of events(!), had discovered

that the way of clemency was the shortest road to conquest" (_Com.

and Prot._ i, 157; cp. p. 137). The laudation here too is

characteristic; but it disposes of Carlyle's.

Carlyle would never be at pains enough to check his presuppositions

by the records. As Gardiner tells (p. 123, _note_), he denounces an

editor for printing a postscript in which Cromwell admitted the

slaughter of "many inhabitants" of Drogheda. This, said Carlyle,

had no authority in contemporary copies. "It appears," writes Dr.

Gardiner, "in the _official_ contemporary copy in _Letters from

Ireland_." What is more, the editor in question had given the

reference!

There are men who to-day will still applaud Cromwell because he quenched

the Irish trouble for the time in massacre and devastation; and others,

blenching at the atrocity of the cure, speak of it with bated breath as

doing him discredit, while they bate nothing of their censure of the

arbitrariness of Charles. Others excuse all Puritan tyranny because of

its "sincerity," as if that plea would not exculpate Torquemada and

Alva. The plain truth is that Cromwell in no way rose above the moral

standards of his generation in his dealings with those whom he was able

to oppress. He found in his creed his absolution for every step to which

blind instinct led him, in Ireland as in England; and it seems to be his

destiny to lead his admirers into the same sophistries--pious with a

difference--as served to keep him on good terms with his conscience

after suppressing an English Parliament or slaughtering an Irish

garrison.

Take, for instance, the fashion in which D'Aubigne shuffles over

the Irish massacres, after quoting Cromwell's worst cant on the

subject: "This extract will suffice. Cromwell acted in Ireland like

a great statesman, and the means he employed were those best

calculated promptly to restore order in that unhappy country. And

yet we cannot avoid regretting that a man--a Christian man--should

have been called to wage so terrible a war, and to show towards his

enemies _greater severity than had ever, perhaps, been exercised by

the pagan leaders of antiquity_. 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for

they shall be called the children of God'" (_The Protector_, 3rd

ed. p. 159).

It is too much even to say, as a more scrupulous critic has done, that

the phenomenon of the Commonwealth represented a great attempt at a

higher life on the part of men nobler and wiser than their

contemporaries.[1127] It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men

of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others

were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it--men

bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose

failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to

their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral

principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the

wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of

unscrupulous conquest. Both men were religious; both as ready to sing of

"Divine Love" as of human hate; and both in their degree were good types

of the supporters of Cromwell. The leaders from the very outset are

visibly normal agitators, full of their own grievances, and as devoid of

the spirit of fellow-feeling, of concern for all-round righteousness, as

any of the men they impeached. Their movement went so far as it did

because, firstly, they were vigorous men resisting a weak man, and later

their own natural progress to anarchy was checked by the self-assertion

of the strongest of them all. Thus their and his service to progressive

political science is purely negative. They showed once for all that an

ignorance guided by religious zeal and "inspiration" is more surely

doomed to disaster than the ignorance of mere primary animal instinct;

and that of the many forms of political optimism, that of Christian

pietism is for the modern world certainly not the least pernicious. The

Puritan name and ideal are in these days commonly associated with high

principle and conscientiousness; and it is true that in the temper and

the tactic of the early revolutionary movement, despite much dark

fanaticism, there was a certain masculine simplicity and sincerity not

often matched in our politics since. But as the years went on,

principles gave way, dragged down by fanaticism and egoism; and the

Puritan temper, lacking light, bred deadly miasmas. Milton himself sinks

from the level of the _Areopagitica_ to that of the _Eikonoklastes_, an

ignoble performance at the behest of the Government, who just then were

suppressing the freedom of the press.[1128] In strict historical truth

the Puritan name and the ideal must stand for utter failure to carry on

a free polity, in virtue of incapacity for rational association; for the

stifling of some of the most precious forces of civilisation--the

artistic; and further for the grafting on normal self-seeking of the

newer and subtler sin of solemn hypocrisy.

This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible,

however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given

section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the

case when he says (_Student's History_, p. 567) of the Barebone

Parliament: "Unfortunately, these godly men [so styled by Cromwell]

were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought

together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery

without providing a substitute, _and to abolish tithes without

providing any other means for the support of the clergy_." It seems

clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an

equivalent for the tithes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam,

ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears

to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it

engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the

proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr.

Gardiner's _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 241, 262; and as to

the tithes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.

It would be hard to show that either Cromwell or the men he used and

overrode were, under trial, more conscientious than the average public

men of later times. Well-meaning he and many of them were; but, then,

most men are well-meaning up to their lights; the moral test for all is

consistency with professed principle under changing conditions. And

hardly one was stedfastly true to the principles he put forward. They

prevaricated under pressure--under harder pressure, no doubt--like other

politicians, with only the difference that they could cite random texts

and "the Lord" in their justification. And inasmuch as their godly

strifes were as blind and as insoluble as those of any factions in

history, they furnished no aid and no encouragement to posterity to

attempt anew the great work of social regeneration. If that is ever to

be done, it must be with saner inspiration and better light than theirs.

It is time that, instead of extolling them as men of superior moral

stature and inspiration, we now realise they brought to a bewildering

problem a vain enlightenment.

On this view, it may be noted, we have a sufficient explanation of

the dissimulations of which Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty.

Between the antiquated asperity of Villemain, who, while extolling

his capacity, charges him with _fourberie habituelle_ (_Hist. de

Cromwell_, 5e edit. p. 272), and the foregone condonations of

Carlyle, there is a mean of common sense. Cromwell was a man of

immense energy and practical capacity, but with no gift for

abstract thought, and spellbound by an incoherent creed.

Consequently he was bound to come to serious confusion when he had

to deal with tense complexities of conduct and violently competing

interests. Coming into desperate positions, for which his religion

was worse than no preparation, and in which it could not possibly

guide him aright, he must needs trip over the snares of diplomacy,

and do his equivocations worse than a more intellectual man would.

Cromwell's lying sounds the more offensive because of its constant

twang of pietism; but that was simply the dialect in which he had

been brought up. Had he lived in our day he would have been able to

prevaricate with a wider vocabulary, which makes a great

difference.

Sec. 7

Lest such a criticism should be suspected of prejudice, it may be well

to note that a contemporary Doctor of Divinity has at some points

exceeded it. It is Dr. Cunningham who argues that, in consequence of the

Puritan bias leading to a cult of the Old Testament rather than the New,

there occurred under Puritan auspices "a retrogression to a lower type

of social morality, which showed itself both at home and abroad."[1129]

He traces Puritan influence specially "(_a_) in degrading the condition

of the labourer; (_b_) in reckless treatment of the native [= coloured]

races; (_c_) in the development of the worst forms of slavery."[1130]

The present writer, who rarely finds it necessary to oppose a Protestant

clergyman on such an issue, is disposed to think the charge overdrawn,

for the following reasons: (1) The English treatment of Ireland was to

the full as cruel in the Elizabethan period, before Puritanism had gone

far, as under Cromwell; (2) the Catholic Spaniards in Mexico and Peru

were as cruel as the Puritan colonists in New England. It is true that

"in all the terrible story of the dealings of the white man with the

savage there are few more miserable instances of cold-blooded cruelty

than the wholesale destruction of the Pequod nation--men, women, and

children--by the Puritan settlers"[1131] of Connecticut. But when

Catholics and pre-Puritan Protestants and Dutch Protestants act

similarly, the case is not to be explained on Dr. Cunningham's theory.

The fallacy seems to lie in supposing that the New Testament has ever

been a determinant in these matters. Mosheim confesses that in the wars

of the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the

Saracens;[1132] and Seneca was at least as humane as Paul.

There is distinct validity, on the other hand, in the charge that

Puritanism worsened the life of the working classes, first by taking

away their ecclesiastical holidays and gild-festivals, and finally by

taking all recreation out of their Sunday. The latter step may be

regarded as the assertion of the economic interest of the Protestant

clergy against the social needs of their flocks. It was not that the

labourers were well off before the Rebellion--here again we must guard

against false impressions[1133]--but that "Puritan ascendancy rendered

the lot of the labourer hopelessly dull."[1134] There is reason to

believe, further, that the Stuart administration, applying the

Elizabethan Poor Law, took considerable pains to relieve distress,[1135]

and that the Commonwealth, on the contrary, treated the lapsed mass

without sympathy;[1136] and it is not unlikely that, as has been

suggested, this had something to do with the popular welcome given to

the Restoration.[1137] The conclusion is that "neither the personal

character nor the political success of the Puritans need lead us to

ignore their baleful influence on society,"[1138] which was, in the

opinion of Arnold, despite his passion for their favourite literature,

to imprison and turn the key upon the English spirit for two hundred

years. Here again the impartial naturalist will detect exaggeration, but

much less than in the current hyperboles to the contrary.

For the rest, the commercial and industrial drift of England, the resort

to the mineral wealth[1139] that was to be the economic basis of later

commerce and empire, the pursuit of capitalistic manufacture, the

building up of a class living on interest as the privileged class of the

past had lived on land monopoly--all went on under Puritanism as under

Catholicism,[1140] Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism. The early

Puritans, taking up the Catholic tradition, denounced usury; but the

clergy of industrial and burgher-ruled States, beginning with Calvin,

perforce receded from that veto.[1141] Even under Elizabeth there was a

good deal of banking,[1142] and under Cromwell English merchants and

money-dealers had learned all the lessons the Dutch could teach them,

weighing the Protector's borrowing credit in the scales of the market as

they would any other. The spirit of pitiless commercial competition

flourished alike under Roundhead and Cavalier,[1143] save in so far as

it was manacled by invidious monopolies; the lust of "empire" was as

keen among the middle class in Cromwell's day as in Elizabeth's and our

own; and even the lot of the workers began to approximate to its modern

aspect through the greater facility of transfer[1144] which followed on

the old rigidity of feudal law and medieval usage. The industrial age

was coming to birth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1089: Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would

perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to

ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton's _Defensio_ and Warburton's

_Notes on Clarendon_, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were

more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the

palace reserved for persons of higher rank (_id._, citing Carte's

_Ormond_, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness

with his son's accessibility (see _Pepys' Diary_, _passim_). Hallam sums

up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes

softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).]

[Footnote 1090: That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite

clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and

attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the tithes that had

been appropriated by the nobility. (Compare Burton, _History of

Scotland_, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet, _Own Time_, bk.

i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner, _History of England, 1603-1642_, vii, 278;

Laing, _History of Scotland_, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour,

_Annals of the Stuart Kings_, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley, _History of the

Rebellions_, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally

never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637,

which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are

explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry's

_Memoirs_, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony

on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of

English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.]

[Footnote 1091: It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's

sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at

Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the

nobility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (_id._ ii,

86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set

up the civil war of the Fronde.]

[Footnote 1092: Hallam, _Const. Hist._ ii, 7.]

[Footnote 1093: _Id._ ii, 10-11.]

[Footnote 1094: _Id._ p. 25. Cp. p. 35.]

[Footnote 1095: As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.]

[Footnote 1096: Cunningham, _English Industry and Commerce_, ii, 219.]

[Footnote 1097: Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's

two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was

tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason

than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of

his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited,

ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once

observes how bad his judgment generally was.]

[Footnote 1098: It is an error to assert, as is often done, that before

Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly

hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with

their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before

Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell

and the Historians" in _Essays in Sociology_, vol. 2.]

[Footnote 1099: It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all

the constitutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he

kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the

army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation.

But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic

taste and practice of the nation.]

[Footnote 1100: He had, indeed, proposed to the Dutch a joint campaign

for the conquest of Spanish America (Gardiner, _History of the

Commonwealth_, ii, 478). But even in that case he would have counted on

plunder.]

[Footnote 1101: Villemain, however, had previously made some approach to

such a view; and Sir John Seeley has left record of how Sir James

Stephen suggested to students a research concerning "the buccaneering

Cromwell" (_Expansion of England_, p. 115).]

[Footnote 1102: _Cromwell's Place in History_, pp. 89, 90.]

[Footnote 1103: Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate_

(1897), ii, 475-76. It is startling to contrast this explicit avowal of

Dr. Gardiner with the assertion of Dr. Holland Rose (art. in the

_Monthly Review_, July, 1902), that the historian averred to him that

English foreign policy _always_ came out well on investigation.]

[Footnote 1104: _Cromwell's Place in History_, p. 97. Cp. p. 101;

Burnet, _History of his Own Time_, bk. i, ed. 1838, pp. 44, 49, 50;

Thurloe, _State Papers_, 1742, vii, 295.]

[Footnote 1105: Letter of De Bordeaux to Servien, May 5, 1653, given by

Guizot, _Histoire de la republique d'Angleterre et de Cromwell_, tom. i,

_end_.]

[Footnote 1106: Letter cited.]

[Footnote 1107: Guizot, _Republique d'Angleterre_, ed. 1854, ii, 216.]

[Footnote 1108: _On a War with Spain._ Cp. the poem, _Upon the Death of

the Lord Protector_.]

[Footnote 1109: _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland._

Dryden's _Heroic Stanzas_ on the death of the Protector show how he

would have swelled the acclaim.]

[Footnote 1110: A similar idea, I find, is well expressed by Seeley,

_Expansion of England_, p. 114.]

[Footnote 1111: As to the element of historic "accident," cp. MM.

Langlois and Seignobos, _Introduction aux etudes historiques_, 2e ed. p.

253.]

[Footnote 1112: Hallam, discriminating the shades of opinion, lays it

down that "A favourer of unlimited monarchy was not a Tory, neither was

a Republican a Whig. Lord Clarendon was a Tory: Hobbes was not; Bishop

Hoadly was a Whig: Milton was not" (_History_, as cited, iii, 199). But

though Hobbes's political doctrine was odious to the Tory clergy, and

even to legitimists as such, it certainly made for Toryism in practice.

In the words of Green: "If Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal

despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one." Cp. T. Whittaker, in _Social

England_, iv, 280, 281, as to the conflict between "divine right"

royalism and Hobbes's principle of an absolute sovereignty set up by

social consent to begin with.]

[Footnote 1113: As to the "high pretensions to religion, combined with

an almost unlimited rapacity" (Petty) on the part of many leading

Puritans, cp. Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 167, 172,

187, 194, 302, 358, etc.]

[Footnote 1114: In the essay on "Hallam's _Constitutional History_"

(1828). In the _History_ the verdict is more favourable.]

[Footnote 1115: _Lives of the Friends of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon_,

by Lady T. Lewis, i, 70; cited in _Falklands_, by T.L. (Author of _Life

of Sir Kenelm Digby_), 1897, pp. 121-22.]

[Footnote 1116: On the general question of his course see the defence of

T.L. (work cited, p. 129 _sq._), and that by Mr. J.A. R. Marriott, _Life

and Times of Viscount Falkland_, 2nd. ed. 1908, p. 331 _sq._]

[Footnote 1117: As against from 100 to 140 "neuters" and Royalists, and

170 lawyers or officers (Hallam, ii, 269, _note_, citing the Clarendon

Papers, iii, 443).]

[Footnote 1118: Republicans there still were in the reigns of William

and Anne (see Hallam, iii, 120, 230; cp. the author's essay on "Fletcher

of Saltoun" in _Our Corner_, Jan., 1888), but they never acted openly as

such.]

[Footnote 1119: See below, ch. iii, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 1120: _E.g._, Richard Overton's pamphlet (1646) entitled _An

Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, wherein the Original, Rise,

Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights,

Freedoms, and Properties of Mankind, are discovered and undeniably

maintained_. Its main doctrines are that "To every individual in nature

is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped

by any"; and that "no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I

over no man's." See a long and interesting extract in the _History of

Passive Obedience since the Reformation_, Amsterdam, 1689, i, 59. As to

the other anarchists, of whom Lilburne was not one, see Gardiner,

_History of the Commonwealth_, i, 47, 48.]

[Footnote 1121: Cp. Gardiner, _Cromwell's Place in History_, pp. 37-50;

_History of the Great Civil War_, 1889, ii, 53-55, 310-12; iii, 527.

While grudgingly noting his straightforwardness, Dr. Gardiner assumes to

discredit Lilburne as impracticable, yet is all the while demonstrating

that Cromwell's constructive work utterly collapsed. Lilburne explicitly

and accurately predicted that the tyrannies of the new _regime_ would

bring about the Restoration (Guizot, _Histoire de la republique

d'Angleterre et de Cromwell_, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 52).]

[Footnote 1122: Dr. Gardiner says he was not, but does not explain away

Cromwell's acquiescence. As to the war-spirit in England, see van

Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, ii, 140, 141.]

[Footnote 1123: Guizot, _Histoire de la republique d'Angleterre et de

Cromwell_, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 202-11; van Kampen, _Geschichte der

Niederlande_, ii, 150, 151; Davies, _History of Holland_, 1841, ii,

709.]

[Footnote 1124: Guizot, as cited, i, 243.]

[Footnote 1125: There is a hardly credible story (Gardiner, _History of

the Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 30) that in supporting Owen's

scheme for a liberal religious establishment he declared: "I had rather

that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's

children should be persecuted." If the story be true, so much the worse

for his treatment of Catholics.]

[Footnote 1126: Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, small ed. iv,

118. Dr. Gardiner actually praises Cromwell for "good sense" (p. 98) in

seeing that the general plantation decreed by the Declaration of 1653

"was absolutely impracticable." It had been his own decree!]

[Footnote 1127: Mr. Harrison, as cited, p. 210. Mr. Allanson Picton, in

his lectures on the _Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth_, has

with more pains and circumspection sought to make good a similar

judgment. But the nature of his performance is tested by his contending

on the one hand that the ideal of the Commonwealth was altogether

premature, and on the other that Cromwell governed with the real consent

of the nation.]

[Footnote 1128: Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, i, 193-96;

cp. Whittaker, in _Social England_, iv, 288, 289.]

[Footnote 1129: _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i, 106.]

[Footnote 1130: _Id._ p. 107.]

[Footnote 1131: _Id._ p. 108, 109, citing Bancroft, i, 401, 402. Seeley

ignored these and many other matters when he pronounced that the annals

of Greater Britain are "conspicuously better than those of Greater

Spain, which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity." In

the usual English fashion, he left out of account, too, the horrors of

the English conquests of Ireland.]

[Footnote 1132: _Ecclesiastical History_, 12 cent., pt. i, ch. ii, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 1133: See Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 13,

as to the distress about 1630.]

[Footnote 1134: Cunningham, as cited, p. 107.]

[Footnote 1135: Redlich and Hirst, _Local Government in England_, 1903,

ii, 361; and Miss Leonard's _Early History of English Poor Relief_, as

there cited.]

[Footnote 1136: See Child's testimony, cited below, p. 467. That,

however, specifies no superiority in the methods of the monarchy.]

[Footnote 1137: Redlich and Hirst, as cited, ii, 363, _note_.]

[Footnote 1138: Cunningham, p. 109.]

[Footnote 1139: See Rogers, _Industrial and Commercial History_, p. 4,

as to the iron trade.]

[Footnote 1140: As to usury in the reign of Henry VII see Busch,

_England unter den Tudors_, i, 257, 389. On the general canonist

teaching there is a very thorough research in Prof. Ashley's

_Introduction to Economic History_, vol. ii, ch. vi.]

[Footnote 1141: Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,

vol. ii (_Modern Times_), pp. 74-87.]

[Footnote 1142: _Id._ p. 100.]

[Footnote 1143: _Id._ pp. 87, 88, 102.]

[Footnote 1144: Cunningham, _op. cit._ p. 90. As to the upset of gild

monopolies in the sixteenth century, see p. 76.]

Chapter III

FROM THE RESTORATION TO ANNE

Sec. 1

The broad outcome of the monarchic restoration under Charles II is the

intensifying of the royalist sentiment by way of reaction from the

Rebellion and the autocracy of the Protector. It has been held that had

Richard Cromwell had the energy of his father he might easily have

maintained his position, so quietly was his accession at first accepted;

and no doubt his irresolution made much of the difference between

success and failure; but nothing can be clearer than the leaning of the

mass of the people to the "lawful" dynasty. It is a proof of Cromwell's

complete dislocation of the old state of touch between the official

classes and the public,[1145] that the army leaders had no misgivings

when they commenced to intrigue against Richard, and that Monk was so

slow to declare for the king when the event showed how immense was the

royalist preponderance. During the Rebellion, London, led by the

Puritans, had dominated the country; under the Protectorate, town and

country were alike dominated by a selected official and military class,

representing a minority with military force to impose its rule. As soon

as this class began to disrupt in factions, the released play of common

sentiment began to carry all forward on a broad tide towards a

Restoration; the only footing on which the English people could yet

unite being one of tradition and superstition. The anarchy of a State

still unfitted for republican government had before brought about the

Protectorate: it now led back to the monarchy. And that the new monarchy

did not become as absolute as the contemporary rule of Louis XIV was

solely owing to the accident of the later adhesion of the restored

dynasty to the Church of Rome, which the mass of the people feared more

than they did even the prospect of another Civil War. It was the memory

of the Fronde that enabled Louis to override the remains of the French

constitution and set up an autocracy; and the same force was now at

work in England. It was the memory of the Civil War that made the

people so much more forbearing with the new king, when his private

adhesion to the Catholic Church became generally suspected,[1146] than

their fathers had been with his father. By temperament and from

experience they were disposed to do anything for the throne; but the

general fear of Popery on the one hand, and the special royalist

aversion to the Puritan sects on the other, plunged the State into a new

ferment of ecclesiastical politics, the strifes of which so far absorbed

the general energy that ill-luck in the commercial wars with Holland

seems to have been almost a necessary result, even had the king ruled

well. Not that the generation of Charles II was a whit less bent on

dominion and acquisition than the decade of the Protectorate.

In this new situation, under a king too little devoted to his trade to

choose really sagacious courses, but too shrewd to ruin himself, occur

the beginnings of parliamentary statesmanship, in the modern sense of

government in harmony with the Crown. The powerful administration of

Strafford had been a matter of helping the Crown to resist Parliament.

The very capable though unforeseeing statesmanship of the Pyms and

Hampdens of the Long Parliament, again, was a matter of resisting the

Crown; and with Shaftesbury such resistance recurred; but the indolence

of the king, joined with his sense of the dangers of the old

favouritism, gave rise to the principle of Ministerial Government before

partisan Cabinets had come into existence. Clarendon had in him much of

the constitutionalist temper. Shaftesbury, however, was better qualified

both by training and parts for the task of statesmanship in a stormy and

unscrupulous generation. Read dispassionately, his story is seen to be

in the main what his careful vindicator would make it--that of a man of

average moral quality, with exceptional energy and resource. The legend

of his wickedness[1147] is somewhat puzzling, in view of his staunch

hostility to Romanism, and of his political superiority to the famous

Deist statesman of the next generation, Bolingbroke, who has been so

little blackened in comparison. A reasonable explanation is that

Shaftesbury was damned by the Church for resisting the king, while

Bolingbroke's services to the Church covered his multitude of sins. But

the idle rumours of Shaftesbury's debauchery[1148] apparently damaged

him with the Protestant Dissenters, and his wickedly reckless policy

over the Popish Plot might easily secure him a share in the infamy which

is the sole association of the name of Titus Oates. Here also, however,

he has been calumniated. Burnet, though plainly disliking him, says

nothing of debauchery in his life, and declined to believe, when Charles

suggested it, that he had any part in trumping up the falsehoods about

the Plot.[1149]

There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury honestly believed

there was a great danger of the re-establishment of Popery, and it is

not at all improbable that he credited some of the tales told, as Lord

Russell solemnly testified at the scaffold that he for his part had

done. To acquit Russell and criminate Shaftesbury is possible only to

those who have made up their minds before trying the case. It is

practically certain, moreover, that some vague Catholic plotting really

did take place;[1150] and in the then posture of affairs nothing was

more likely. Shaftesbury, like the other capable statesmen of the

Restoration, was in favour of toleration of the Dissenters; but like all

other Protestant statesmen of the age, he thought it impossible to

tolerate Catholicism. Nor can it well be doubted that had Charles or

James been able to establish the Roman system, it would have gone hard

with Protestantism. It is true that the only exhibition thus far of the

spirit of tolerance in Protestant and Catholic affairs in France and

England had been on the part of Richelieu towards the Huguenots,

themselves intensely intolerant; but it could not reasonably be supposed

that an English Catholic king or statesman, once well fixed in power,

would have the wisdom or forbearance of Richelieu. The two systems, in

fine, aimed at each other's annihilation; and Shaftesbury simply acted,

politically that is, as the men of the First Rebellion would have done

in similar circumstances. Instead of dismissing him as a mere

scoundrel, we are led to realise how imperfectly moralised were all the

men of his age in matters of religion and racial enmity. The friend of

Locke can hardly have been a rascal.

For the rest, he was admitted even by the malicious and declamatory

Dryden to have been a just Chancellor; it is proved that he opposed the

Stop of the Exchequer; and he sharply resisted the rapacity of the royal

concubines. In his earlier policy towards Holland he conformed odiously

enough to the ordinary moral standard of the time[1151] in politics, a

standard little improved upon in the time of Palmerston, and not

discarded by those Englishmen who continue to talk of Russia as

England's natural enemy, or by those who speak of Germany as a trade

rival that must be fought to a finish. His changes of side between the

outbreak of the Rebellion and his death, while showing the moral and

intellectual instability of the period, were not dishonourable, and are

not for a moment to be compared with those of Dryden, most unstable of

all men of genius, whose unscrupulous but admirably artistic portrait of

the statesman has doubtless gone far to keep Shaftesbury's name in

disesteem. It may be, again, that his sufficient wealth takes away

somewhat from the merit of his steadfast refusal of French bribes; but

the fact should be kept in mind,[1152] as against the other fact that

not only the king and some of the Opposition but Algernon Sidney took

them.[1153] On the whole, Shaftesbury was the most tolerable of the

Ministers of his day, though his animus against Catholicism made him

grossly unscrupulous toward individual Catholics; and his miscalculation

of possibilities, in clinging to the scheme of giving Monmouth the

succession, finally wrecked his career. He had almost no alternative,

placed and principled as he was, save to call in the Prince of Orange;

and this would really have been at that moment no more feasible a course

than it was to declare Monmouth the heir, besides being more hazardous,

in that William was visibly less easy to lead. Of Shaftesbury, Burnet

admits that "his strength lay in the knowledge of England"; and when he

took a fatal course, it was because the whole situation was desperate.

His fall measures not so much the capacity of Charles as the force which

the royalist superstition had gathered.

Sec. 2

This growth can be traced in the clerical literature of the time. The

conception of a "divine right" inhering in kings by heredity--a

conception arising naturally as part of the general ethic of feudal

inheritance--had been emphasised on the Protestant side in England[1154]

by way of express resistance to the Papacy, which from the time of

Gregory VII had been wont in its strifes with emperors and kings to deny

their divine right and to assert its own, formally founding the latter,

however, on the "natural" right inherent in masses of men to choose

their own rulers, even as the citizens of Rome had been wont to elect

the Popes.[1155] The total effect of the English Rebellion was to give

an immense stimulus to the high monarchic view, not now as against the

Papacy, but as against Parliament. When the learned Usher drew up at the

request of Charles I his treatise[1156] on _The Power communicated by

God to the Prince, and the Obedience required of the Subject_, he

proceeded almost wholly on arguments from the Scriptures and the

Fathers; not that there were not already many deliverances from modern

authorities on the point, but that these evidently had not entered into

the ordinary stock of opinion. On the papal side, from Thomas

Aquinas[1157] onwards, the negative view had been carefully set forth,

not merely as a papal claim, but also as an obvious affirmation of the

ancient "law of nature." Thus the Spanish Jesuit Suarez (1548-1617) had

in his _Tractatus de Legibus_, while deriving all law from the will of

God, expressly rejected the doctrine that the power of rule inheres by

succession in single princes. Such power, he declared, "by its very

nature, belongs to no one man, but to a multitude of men,"[1158] adding

a refutation of the patriarchal theory which "might have caused our

English divines to blush before the Jesuit of Granada."[1159] At the

beginning of the seventeenth century, again, while leading Englishmen

were affirming divine right, the German Protestant Althusius, Professor

of Law at Herborn, publishing his _Politica methodice digesta_ (1603),

declares in a dedication to the States of Friesland that the supreme

power lies in the people.[1160] Hooker, too, had stamped the principle

of "consent" with his authority, very much as did Suarez.[1161]

But the compiler of _The History of Passive Obedience since the

Reformation_,[1162] after showing that the tenet[1163] had been held by

dozens of Protestant divines and jurists after the Reformation, and even

strongly affirmed by Nonconformists, is able to cite nearly as many

assertions of it in the reign of Charles II as in the whole preceding

period. The clergy were, indeed, able to show that the principle of

non-resistance had been a common doctrine up to the Great Rebellion;

and, though the contrary view was on the whole more common,[1164] it

well illustrates the instinctive character of political movement that

the democratic doctrine had followed the course of action step by step,

and not preceded it. There had been resistance before the right to

resist was formulated in the schools. And Bishop Guthry records that at

the General Assembly in Edinburgh in January, 1645, "everyone had in his

hand that book lately published by Mr. Samuel Rutherford, entitled _Lex

Rex_, which was stuffed with positions that in the time of peace and

order would have been judged damnable treasons; yet were now so idolised

that, whereas in the beginning of the work Buchanan's treatise, _De Jure

Regni apud Scotos_, was looked upon as an oracle, this coming forth, it

was slighted as not anti-monarchical enough, and Rutherford's _Lex Rex_

only thought authentic."[1165] So Milton's answer to Salmasius,

vindicating the right of rebellion as inherent in freemen, marks the

high tide of feeling that sustained the foremost regicides. But in the

nature of the case the feeling swung as far the other way when they had

touched their extreme limit of action; and when the royalist cause came

in the ascendant, the monarchical principle was perhaps more

passionately cherished in England than in any of the other European

States.[1166] How it normally worked may be seen in Dryden's sycophantic

dedication[1167] of his _All for Love_ to Lord Danby (1678), sinking as

it does to the extravagant baseness of the declaration that "every

remonstrance of private men has the seed of treason in it." It was in

this very year that Charles and Danby made the secret treaty with

France, the revelation of which by Louis soon afterwards brought Danby

to the Tower; and Danby it was who three years before carried through

the House of Lords a bill to make all placemen declare on oath that they

considered all resistance to the king unlawful.

The handful of remaining republicans and political Liberals, appealing

as they did to tradition in their treatises against the traditional

pleadings of the Churchmen and royalists, could have no appreciable

influence on the public, because the mere spirit of tradition, when not

appealed to as the sanction of a living movement of resistance, must

needs make for passivity. Algernon Sidney's posthumous folio on

Government in answer to Filmer's _Patriarcha_, arguing the question of

self-government _versus_ divine right, and going over all the ground

from Nimrod downwards, point by point, is a far greater performance than

Filmer's; and Locke in turn brought a still greater power of analysis to

bear on the same refutation; but it is easy to see that Filmer's is the

more readable book, and that with its straightforward dogmatism it would

most readily convince the average Englishman. Nor was the philosophy all

on one side, though Filmer has ten absurdities for the other's one, and

was so unguarded as to commit himself to the doctrine that the

possession of power gives divine right, no matter how come by. Sidney

himself always argued that "Vertue" entitled men to superior power; and

though he might in practice have contended that the choice of the

virtuous should be made by the people, his proposition pointed rather

plainly back to Cromwell, acclaimed by Milton as the worthiest to bear

rule. And to be governed by a military autocrat, however virtuous and

capable, was as little to the taste of that generation as it was to the

taste of Carlyle's. Even a clergyman could see that the political

problem was really one of the practical adjustment of crude conflicting

interests, and that there could easily be as much friction under a

virtuous monarch as under a dissolute one. The conscientiousness of the

first Charles had wrought ruin, where the vicious indolence of the

second steered safely.

As Filmer and Sidney, besides, really agreed in awarding "the tools to

him who could handle them," and as the most pressing practical need was

to avoid civil war, the solution for most people was the more clearly a

"loyal" submission to the reigning house; and no amount of abstract

demonstration of the right of self-government could have hindered the

habit of submission from eating deeper and deeper into the national

character if it were not for the convulsion which changed the dynasty

and set up a deep division of "loyalties," keeping each other in check.

In the strict sense of the term there was no class strife, no democratic

movement, no democratic interest; indeed, no ideal of public interest as

the greatest good of the whole. Thus Harrington's _Oceana_, with its

scheme of "an equal Commonwealth, a Government established upon an equal

Agrarian, arising into the Superstructures of three Orders, the Senat

debating and proposing, the People resolving, and the Magistracy

executing by an equal Rotation through the suffrage of the People given

by the Ballot"[1168]--this conception, later pronounced by Hume "the

only valuable model of a commonwealth that has yet been offered to the

public,"[1169] although the same critic exposed its weakness--was in

fact as wholly beside the case as the principle of the Second Coming. No

man desired the proposed ideal; and the very irrelevance of the

systematic treatises strengthened the case for use and wont. The

political discussions, being thus mostly in the air, could serve only to

prepare leading men to act on certain principles should events forcibly

lead up to new action. But the existing restraints on freedom did not

supply sufficient grievance to breed action. The dissenters themselves

were almost entirely resigned to their ostracism; and the preponderance

of the Church and the Tory party was complete.

Luckily the political fanaticism of Charles I reappeared in his son

James; and that king's determination to re-establish in his realm the

Church of his devotion served to break a spell that nothing else could

have shattered.[1170] The very Church which had been assuring him of his

irresistibility, having to choose between its own continuance and his,

had perforce to desert him; and the old panic fear of Popery, fed by the

spectacle of Jeffreys' Bloody Assize, swept away the monarch who had

aroused it. He would have been an energetic king; his naval Memoirs

exhibit zeal and application to work; and he had so much of rational

humanity in him that in Scotland he pointed out to the popes of

Presbyterianism how irrational as well as merciless was their treatment

of sexual frailty. But his own fanaticism carried him athwart the

superstition which would have sufficed to make him a secure despot in

all other matters; and when the spirit of freedom seemed dying out in

all forms save that of sectarian zealotry, his assault on that brought

about the convulsion which gave it fresh chances of life.

Sec. 3

While practical politics was thus becoming more and more of a stupid war

of ecclesiastical prejudices, in which the shiftiest came best off, and

even theoretic politics ran to a vain disputation on the purposes of God

towards Adam, some of the best intelligence of the nation, happily, was

at work on more fruitful lines. The dire results of the principles which

had made for union and strife of late years, drove thoughtful men back

on a ground of union which did not seem to breed a correlative

malignity.[1171] It was in 1660, the year of the Restoration, that the

Royal Society was constituted; but its real beginnings lay in the first

years of peace under Cromwell, when, as Sprat records, a "candid,

unpassionate company" began to meet at Oxford in the lodgings of Dr.

Wilkins, of Wadham College,[1172] to discuss questions of natural fact.

"The University had, at the time, many Members of its own, who had begun

a free way of reasoning; and was also frequented by some gentlemen, of

Philosophical Minds, whom the misfortunes of the Kingdom, and the

security and ease of a retirement amongst Gowns-men, had drawn

thither."[1173] In constituting the Society, the associates "freely

admitted men of different religions, countries, and professions of

life," taking credit to themselves for admitting an intellectual

shopkeeper, though "the far greater number are Gentlemen, free, and

unconfined."[1174] Above all things they shunned sectarian and party

feeling. "Their first purpose was no more then onely the satisfaction of

breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another,

without being ingag'd in the passions and madness of that dismal

Age;"[1175] and when they formally incorporated themselves it was

expressly to discuss "things and not words."

It is noteworthy that the French Academy, which gave the immediate

suggestion for the constitution of the English Royal Society,

contained almost no authors save belletrists and ecclesiastics. In

the list of members down to 1671 (_Relation_ cited, p. 336), I find

no writer on science save De la Chambre, the King's physician. And

the first important undertaking of the Academy (projected about

1637) was a _Dictionary_. Sprat (p. 56) suggests that the Royal

Society has usefully influenced the Academy in the direction of the

study of things rather than words. (Compare the avowed literary

ideal of the authors of the _Relation_, p. 373.) But although the

French group from the first tended mainly to literary pursuits,

they too aimed at a "free way of reasoning," "et de ce premier age

de l'Academie, ils en parlent comme d'un age d'or, durant lequel

avec toute l'innocence et toute la _liberte_ des premiers siecles,

sans bruit, et sans pompe, et sans autres loix que celles de

l'amitie, ils goutoient ensemble tout ce que la societe des

esprits, et la vie raisonnable, ont de plus doux et de plus

charmant" (_Relation_, p. 7).

And even while Sprat was writing, the French were making up their

scientific leeway. In 1664-65 there was published in English a

translation of _A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi

of France upon Questions of all Sorts of Philosophy and other_

(sic) _Natural Knowledge made in the Assembly of the_ Beaux Esprits

_at_ Paris, _by the most Ingenious Persons of that Nation_ (2 vols.

sm. folio), wherein, though the scientific discussions are

distinctly amateurish, there are many speculations likely to

stimulate both French and English experiment. There is indeed

little to choose in point of solidity between the early themes of

the English Royal Society and those of the French Academy. On the

other hand, the French Government specially promoted exact study.

In 1666 Colbert established the _Academie Royale des Sciences_, for

the promotion of Geometry, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry,

building a laboratory and an observatory, and inviting to France

Cassini and Huygens (Life of Colbert by Bernard, in ed. of

Colbert's _Last Testament_, 1695). Colbert further founded the

_Academie Royale d'Architecture_ in 1671; and had set up what came

to be the _Academie des Inscriptions_ in his own house. All three

bodies did excellent work. (See the acknowledgment, as regards

science, in Lawrence's _Lectures on Comparative Anatomy_, etc.,

1819, p. 13.) In France, besides, the philosophy and science of

Descartes made way from the first, and it was his works that first

gave Locke "a relish for philosophical things." On the other hand,

Sprat, who was not without an eye to literature, and made a

reputation by his style, acutely notes (p. 42) that "in the Wars

themselves (which is a time wherein all Languages use, if ever, to

increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busie and active

times there arise more new thoughts of some men, which must be

signifi'd and varied by new expressions)" the English speech

"received many fantastical terms ... and with all it was enlarg'd

by many sound and necessary Forms and Idioms which it before

wanted"; and he proposes an authoritative dictionary on the lines

of the French project.

The English naturalists would have nothing to do with theology, "these

two subjects, God and the Soul, being only forborn."[1176] Reasoning

from the development of military faculty in the Civil War, they decided

that "greater things are produced by the free way than the

formal"[1177]--a principle already put forth by Renaudot, in the preface

to the reports of the French Academy, as the guide of their procedure.

By attending solely to results and questions of concrete fact, the

inquirers were "not only free from Faction, but from the very causes and

beginnings of it";[1178] and in the language of the time they held that

"by this means there was a race of young Men provided against the next

Age, whose minds receiving from them their just Impressions of sober and

generous knowledge, were invincibly arm'd against all the inchantments

of Enthusiasm"[1179]--that is, of religious fanaticism. And with this

recoil from fanaticism there went the stirring and energetic curiosity

of people habituated to action by years of war, and needing some new

excitement to replace the old. While many turned to debauchery, others

took to "experiment."[1180] Says Sprat:--