PRINCIPAL
W. R. TAYLOR
COLLECTION
1951
FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
FACTORS IN
MODERN HISTORY
A. F. POLLARD, M.A.
/•'
PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
AUTHOR OF 'HENRY vin.,' 'A LIFE OF THOMAS CRANMER'
'ENGLAND UNDER PROTECTOR SOMERSET,' ETC., ETC.
521423
NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
1907
D
.210
Pi
Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
CONTENTS
I.— NATIONALITY
PACK
Imagination necessary for the study of History I
The meaning of History more important than facts or dates, . 2
Modern History deals with the national State, .... 3
Ancient History with the City-state, and Medieval History with
the World-state, 4
Empire and Papacy, ......... 5
Absence of nationality from medieval institutions, ... 6
International law, letters, and religion, ..... 7-8
The gradual nationalisation of all these factors, . . . .9-12
Why do they become nationalised ? . . . . . . 13
What is national character ? . 14
The difference bet ween race and nationality 15
Nationality the result of the influence of environment upon race, . 16
Primitive man and the soil, . . . . . . . . 17
The differentiation of race, ... ..... 18
The territorial supersedes the personal relation, . . . . 19
Local v. national consciousness, ....... 20-21
The growth of nationalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 22
The decline of international institutions, 23
National character the effect rather than the cause of History, . 24
II.— THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
The questions when? where? how? and why? of History, . . 26-27
Comparative unimportance of dates, .28
The question why ? all-important, ...... 29
History not an exact science, ....... 30
Why does Modern History begin when it does ? . . . . 31
Gradual transition from Medieval to Modern History, . . 32
Natura nihil facit per saltum, ....... 33
Undue neglect of the fifteenth century, 34
Why was America discovered in 1492 ? 35
Because the Turks had choked the old trade-routes, ... 36-
vi FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
PAGE
Geographical expansion due to commercial motives, ... 37
Consequent intellectual expansion, 38
Growth of a middle-class, ........ 39-40
Feudalism a rural organisation which contemplated only two
classes, .......... 41
Fluidity of class-distinctions in England, ..... 42-45
Economic expansion in England, ....... 46-47
The consequent quickening of middle-class intellect in the
Renaissance, 48
Gradual development of the Renaissance and the Reformation, . 49
Both are aspects of middle-class revolt against ecclesiasticism, . 50
III.— THE NEW MONARCHY
Patriotism becomes national, ....... 52
The growth of the idea of the national State, .... 53
The Church as the governess of the State, ..... 54
The State reaches maturity and the governess is dismissed, . . 55
Slow development of this process, ...... 56
Action and reaction of forces and ideas, ..... 57-58
Le nouveau Messie cst le rot, ....... 59
The making of modern nations, . . . . . . . 60
Austria, ........... 61
Spain, ........... 62-64
France, 65-66
Birth of international relations, ....... 67
The monarch is the representative of the new nationality, . . 68
He is reinforced by the Renaissance and the Reception, . . 69
Absolutist tendencies in the Reformation, ..... 70-71
Factors in the New Monarchy in England, . . . . . 72
Popular attitude towards Parliament and the Monarchy, . . 73
Magna Carta not yet discovered, ....... 74
* The divinity that doth hedge a king,' ...... 75
Royalty a caste apart, . . . 76
The real tyranny of Tudor times, . ...... 77-78
IV.— HENRY VIII. AND THE ENGLISH
REFORMATION
The wives of Henry viii., 79
The pilot who weathered the storm, ...... 80
His other achievements, ........ 81
Necessity of finding some explanation for his reign, ... 82
Parcere subjectis et debellare supcrbos, 83
CONTENTS vii
PAGE
Demagogue and despot, ........ 84
Machiavelli's Prince in action, . 85
Salus populi supremo, lex, ........ 86
Popular approval of this doctrine, 87
And of Tudor rule, 88
Henry's education, ......... 89
Wolsey's failure, 90
Parliament and the Church, . . . . . . . 91
The ' divorce ' of Catherine of Aragon, ..... 92
The question of the Succession, ....... 93
The Pope's dilemma, ......... 94
The breaking of the bonds of Rome, ...... 95
State v. Church, 96
The nationalisation of the Church, . . . . . . 97
The Royal Supremacy, ....... 98-101
The Anglican compromise, . . . . . . . .102
The ' Morning Star ' of the Reformation, 103
V.— PARLIAMENT
The eclipse of Parliaments in the sixteenth century, . . . 104
The feebleness of the English House of Lords, . . . .105
Popular indifference to the House of Commons, .... 106
Representation an irksome duty, 107-108
Parliament re-created by the Tudors, ...... 109
Variations in the Tudor attitude towards Parliament, . . . no
Wolsey's ecclesiastical aversion to Parliament, . . . . 1 1 1
The Parliamentary revival after Wolsey's fall, . . . . 112
Elizabeth and her Parliaments, . . . . . . 113-114
Was Parliament servile under Henry vni. ?. . . . 115-116
Freedom of election, 117-118
The dominant mercantile interest, . . . . . .119
Cromwell's case, 120
Interference under Edward vi. and Mary, . . . . .121
The Cornish boroughs and the Wentworths, . . . . 122
Bribery and corruption, . . . . . . . .123
Freedom of speech, . . . . . . . . .124
Freedom from arrest, . . . . . . . . .125
Tudor v. Stuart policy, . . . . . . . .126
The growth of Parliamentary pugnacity, . . . . 127-129
VI.— SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Government in the interest of the governors, . . . .130
Predominance of the landed interest, 131
viii FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
PAGE
Growth of the mercantile interest, . . . . . .132
Little sympathy with the masses, . . . . . . 133
The peasant under the feudal system, 134
Collectivism in the Middle Ages, 135
Peasant Revolts, 136
Rise of Capitalism, 137
The cash-nexus applied to the land, 138
Custom v. competition, . . . . . . . 139
£. The meaning of Enclosures, ....... 140
A revolution of the rich against the poor, 141
Its effects on the military system, 142
And on education, . . . . . . . . .143
The problem of the unemployed, 144-145
Modern poverty the creation of modern wealth, . . . .146
The attitude of the government, 147
John Hales, 148
Protector Somerset's action in 1548, ...... 149
' As it pleaseth my landlord, so shall it be,' 150
Combines and Trades Unions, . . . . . . .151
Parliament v. Protector, . . . . . . . .152
The risings of 1549, .153
Reaction under Warwick, . . . . . . . .154
The pauperisation of the poor, 155
VII.— POLITICAL IDEAS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
Politics v. Religion in the sixteenth century, . . . .156
An age of secularisation, . . . . . . . .157
Predominance of the State, 158
Reformers set up the divine right of the State, . . . 159-160
The influence of Roman Civil Law, . . . . . .161
Reasons of State adopted by the Church, 162
Cranmer's position, ......... 163
Divine Right v. Divine Hereditary Right, . . . . .164
James i.'s theory, ........ 165-166
Civil v. Common Law, . . . . . . . 167-168
The difference between English and other Constitutions, . . 1:70
The Revolution of 1688, r i
Hobbes's Leviathan, . . . . . . . . iy 1
Sovereignty of the State, 17;
The Contract theory, 174
Hobbes on the state of nature, i'5
Filmer's Patriarcha, I |6
CONTENTS ix
PACE
Locke's Two Treatises, . . . . . . .177
Reply to Hobbes, . . . .178
Rousseau on the Social Contract, 179
Montesquieu and Maine, . . . . . . . .180
VIII.— CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND AND
SCOTLAND
Anglo-Scottish antipathies, 182-183
England Erastian, Scotland theocratic, . . . . .184
Parliament v. Convocation, 186
The weakness of the Church in England, . . . . .187
The weakness of Parliament in Scotland, 188
Absence of a middle class, . . . . . . . .189
The strength of the Church in Scotland, .... 190-191
The real Parliament of Scotland is the Congregation, . . . 192
' New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large,' . . . 193-194
Puritanism in England, . . . . . . . 195
The Independents, 196
Selden and the Erastians, . . . . . . . .197
English State v. Scottish Kirk, 198
Dunbar, 199
Cromwell's government in Scotland, ...... 200
The Restoration in Scotland, 201
Witchcraft, 202
Politics and Religion under Charles II., 203
Political theology, 204
The decadence of dogma, ........ 205
The Union of 1707, 206
IX.— CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS
Written and rigid Constitutions, ....... 208
Does the British Constitution exist ?...... 209
Flexible Constitutions, . . . . . . . .210
The American Constitution, . . . . . . .211
The Prime Minister, 212
The Cabinet, 213
Conventions of the Constitution, ....... 214
Reasons for the rigidity of the American Constitution, . . . 215
Why were the Cromwellian Constitutions written and rigid ? . 216
Cromwell's constitutional ideas, 217
Government by the sword, 218
Fundamental Law, 219-220
Magna Carta as Fundamental Law, . . . . . .221
x FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
PAGE
Cromwell claims prerogative, 222
The Instrument of Government, 223
Parliamentary Union, ......... 224
Redistribution of Seats, ........ 225
Abolition of rotten boroughs, ....... 226
Readjustment of the Franchise, 227
The 'Other' House, 228
The failure of the Instrument, 229
Cromwell on the Levellers, ........ 230
Cromwell as King, . . . . . . . . .231
The Humble Petition and Advice, 232
The revolt of the Republicans, 233
'Good King Charles's golden days,' 234-235
X.— COLONIAL EXPANSION
The Birth-year of the Empire 236
Its relative unimportance, ........ 237
The Seven Years' War, 238
The share of the soldier in the building of Empires, . . . 239
A million and a quarter Britons v. eighty thousand French, . . 240
America in 1650,. ......... 241
Elizabethan failures, ... * 242-243
Eldorado v. Empire, 244-245
The French in Canada, ........ 246
The Pilgrim Fathers, 247
Religious persecution, ......... 248
Dutch, Swedes, and French, 249
Nova Scotia, 250
The first conquest of Quebec, 251
The first Colonial Federation, 252-253
The Colonies and the Mother Country 254
Carolina, 255
The New Netherlands, 256
Their conquest by the English, 257
New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, 258
The last Stuart attack on Colonial liberties, 259
The Revolution and the Colonies 260
XL— THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON AND
THE STUDY OF HISTORY
The neglect of History in London University, . . . 263-265
The use of History 266-267
CONTENTS xi
PAGF.
Education v. technical instruction, 268
Popular indifference, ......... 269
The relation of a Charlottenburg to a University, . . . 270
The example of Germany, . . . . . . . .271
German interest in History, 272
Failure to establish a Chair of History in London University, . 273
Difficulties of creating an undergraduate School of History in
London, ......... 274-275
Internal v. External Examinations, ...... 276
Unique facilities for a Post-graduate School of History in London, 277
Need for a school of Naval History, ...... 278
Military History, ......... 270
The History of London, 280
The History of our own Times, . . . . . . .281
The national functions and duties of Universities, . . . 282
The comprehensiveness of History, ...... 283
The need for criticism, ........ 284
The question of Endowments, 285
A London University Press, 286
The Future of London University, ...... 287
NOTE. — The Eleventh of these Essays was published in the National
Review (December 1904), to the editor of which the writer is indebted for
permission to reprint.
FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
NATIONALITY
WHATEVER I may hope to say or to do in the
ensuing lectures, one thing at least I shall not
attempt ; and that is, to give you a history of
England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. An effort of that kind would simply result in
the perpetration of yet another of those miserable
text-books of English history, which may be neces-
sary but are certainly evil, which prefer knowledge
to understanding, and seem expressly designed to
nip the bud of historical interest and to clip the
wings of historical imagination. It is almost a
miracle that any incipient students of history survive
this crushing ordeal : if they do, it must be due to
the inspiration of the living voice; and no teacher
of history worth the name relies upon the compilations
which the examination-system compels him to inflict
upon his class.
My object is primarily to stimulate imagination,
and I make no apology for placing imagination in
the forefront of all the qualifications indispensable
for the student and teacher of history. By that
A
2 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
curious process of deterioration, which the meaning
of words undergoes, the word imagination' is com-
monly restricted to the imagination of deeds which
were never done, and of causes which never existed.
Properly it includes fact as well as fiction, and
signifies the power of realising things unseen, and
of realising the meaning of things seen. A portrait
is a truer image than a fancy sketch ; and, when an
English ambassador wrote to Henry VIII. that Holbein
had made a very faithful image of Anne of Cleves,
he meant that the portrait was true to life. So history
can never be true to life without imagination. Facts
and figures are dry bones ; it requires imagination
to clothe them with life and meaning; and no
accumulation of materials, no ransacking of archives,
will make a man a historian without the capacity to
interpret and construct. Not that I wish to depreciate
the archivist or the burrower after facts. Solomon
can only build the temple after David has collected
the materials. And these materials are the most
valuable means by which to train and cultivate the
imagination. Reading history ready-made is to making
it out oneself from documents what looking on at a
football match is to playing the game oneself, or what
reading a detective story is to tracking out a criminal ;
and to teach the intelligent use of documents is the
first of the neglected duties of our schools of history.
Facts, therefore — I make the avowal at the risk of
the laughter of pedants — are only a secondary con-
sideration from my point of view, and they will only
be used as illustrations. That phrase is perhaps un-
NATIONALITY 3
lucky ; at least it has lately caused some innocent
merriment. And, indeed, one's facts should be correct;
but their meaning is greater than the facts themselves,
and it is with the meaning of historical facts that I am
now concerned. It is only when we penetrate the
outer husks of facts that we can reach the kernel of
historic truth. A fact of itself is of little value unless
it conveys a meaning. There is a meaning behind all
facts, if one can only discover it ; but to discover the
meaning of facts is commonly the last object at which
the writers of text-books aim. Facts are stated as
though their statement were all that is necessary, and
as though to remember them were more important than
to understand them, as though the end of education
were to make the youthful mind a lumber-room of facts,
instead of an efficient instrument, trained to perform
the duties of life and to discover the features of truth.
So far as may be, then, I hope to bring out the
significance which underlies the ordinary facts of some
portions of modern English history, and particularly
that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And
in this first lecture I want to take what seems to me
the dominant note of modern, as distinct from medieval
and ancient history — I mean nationality. For modern
history deals primarily with the national State, while
ancient history deals largely with the City-state, and
medieval history with the World-state, secular or
ecclesiastical. That, of course, is a very rough
generalisation ; the transitory empire of Alexander,
if it can be considered a state at all, was almost a
world-state. City-states, too, existed in Italy and in
4 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Germany during the Middle Ages, and Geneva, Venice,
Genoa continued the species beyond the latest of the
various dates at which modern history is said to have
begun. Nevertheless, the City-state is the predominant
type of the ancient civilised world ; with it Aristotle's
Politics^ the greatest text-book of political science, is
almost exclusively concerned. Now, Aristotle says
a great many things about the State, which are not
yet out of date : its permanence can only be secured
by the toleration of all the elements in it, it must
pay great regard to education, must have a care of
virtue, rests upon justice, is not made happier by
conquest, and so forth. His doctrine that it should
be economically self-sufficing is perhaps more familiar
than indisputable, but his criteria as to its size sound
strange in modern ears. It must not be so large that
its citizens, gathered in one public meeting, cannot hear
the speaker's voice, and a State the size of Birmingham
would have appeared to him unwieldy from its bulk.
Such an estimate illustrates the difference, made by
the development of modern representative systems
and the abolition of slavery, between the ancient and
the modern state.
The World-state is not less typical of the Middle
Ages, though perhaps more as regards its theory than
its practice. You remember the Cheshire cat in Alice
in Wonderland, whose smile remained long after the
cat had disappeared. The same phenomenon is
common enough in history and in politics ; and the
idea of the World-state continued to fascinate men's
minds long after it had lost material existence. The
NATIONALITY 5
Roman Empire had become more than an institution ;
it was the only form in which men could conceive the
political organisation of the world. For centuries it
had existed ; and the contempt and neglect of pagan
history, which Gregory the Great impressed upon men's
minds, obliterated the knowledge that there had ever
been any different political existence. Hence the
revival of the Empire in the times of Charles the
Great and Otto — a revivalism which reaches its height
with Otto III. and the fancied approach of the millen-
nium in the year 1000. Hence, too, the development
of the Papacy, which grew up under the shadow, and
moulded itself after the form, of the Roman Empire.
Empire and Papacy, said Zwingli, both come from
Rome. The law of the one was Roman civil law, the
law of the other was Roman canon law, and in both
cases it was universal. The world was one and in-
divisible, though it had two aspects, secular and ecclesi-
astical, temporal and spiritual. In one aspect the
Emperor was its head, in the other the Pope. The
two spheres were ill-defined, and the struggle between
them fills the greater part of medieval history,
Papalists compared the Papacy with the sun, the
empire with the moon, which only shone with the
reflected light conferred by Pope Leo ill. upon Charles
the Great. The empire was like the body, temporal
and transitory, the Papacy was like the soul, spiritual
and imperishable.
Popes claimed by right both swords, the temporal
and the spiritual, but entrusted the temporal sword to
the emperor, because the execution of justice was
6 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
menial work beneath their spiritual dignity. Im-
perialists retorted with arguments drawn from Biblical
injunctions of obedience to the powers that be and
from the Scriptural recognition of the divine ordination
of authority. The clergy might be the bearers of the
keys, but it was only in the capacity of turnkeys — a
more menial office than the execution of justice. And
so the contest waged in the closet and on the field of
battle, with sword and dagger and spear, with bell,
book and candle. It was ever a strife between two
powers and two jurisdictions, both claiming to be
universal and international. Although the voice of
nationality is heard in the councils of Philip IV. of
France and in the wars of the fourteenth century, the
world is still to Dante one monarchy and the emperor
Henry VII. is its monarch.
This absence of nationality is characteristic of all
medieval institutions. The empire is ex hypothesi&n.
international organisation. It is associated with the
German monarchy as a rule, but that is only an
accident. The empire, claiming all the world as its
subjects, knows nothing of aliens ; they are a modern
invention. Alfonso of Castile is a candidate for the
empire ; he fails, but his Spanish nationality is no bar
to his pretension. Later on, Henry vill. and Francis I.
are candidates for the imperial throne ; German
sentiment is against them, but there is no law to
exclude an Englishman or a Frenchman. Any one
can hold an imperial fief ; a Pole or a Spaniard is the
same as a German in the eyes of the law of the
empire ; they are no more foreigners than a Saxon
NATIONALITY 7
or a Suabian. Law, in fact, is in the Middle Ages
international. There are, it is true, various kinds of
law, civil law, canon law, feudal law and folkright ;
and the differences are pronounced enough. But they
are not national differences. Feudal custom is much
the same, wherever you meet it in Western Europe.
The tenant-in-chief, the mailed knight, the curia regis,
the lord's demesne, the castle, rights of jurisdiction,
obligations of defence, are everywhere. We are taught,
indeed, that feudalism was introduced into England
from France ; but recently a French scholar has re-
paid us the compliment by asserting that feudalism
was imported from England into Normandy and
thence spread throughout France. The honour is
apparently not coveted. But no one people invented
feudalism ; it grew out of disorderly conditions which
were common all over Europe, and therefore it assumed
a common form.
If feudal law and custom were not national, still less
so were Roman civil and Roman canon law. The
emperor was the fountain of one ; quod principi placuit
legis habet vigorem wrote Ulpian. The Pope was the
fountain of the other ; habet omnia jura in scrinio suo,
said Clement VII. The State might resist the applica-
tion of canon law as the English barons did in 1236,
and the Church might forbid the study of civil law as
did Popes Honorius and Innocent III. ; but in both
cases it would be two universal claims contending in
a particular locality, rather than a national contending
against a universal sentiment.
As with laws, so with letters. The Middle Ages
8 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
had their Esperanto ready made and natural in growth.
Every one in Western Europe who could write, wrote
the same language, and that was Latin. History was
easy to the monkish chronicler because his original
documents were all in the same language. Intercourse
with foreign scholars was robbed of its impediments
and perhaps some of its amusement ; and the barriers,
which now obstruct the interchange of intellectual
currency, had not yet been erected. Alien and
foreigner were not yet terms of insult and contempt.
The literature, on which youth was nourished, was
not painted red nor adorned with Union Jacks.
Vernacular tongues were spoken as dialects are to-
day, but they were not written ; and national literatures
only arise when the Middle Ages decay. The Bible
was the same wherever it was read ; the same Vulgate
text served for English and Italian, for German and
for Spaniard. And although there was room for local
option in the matter of ritual, its broad outlines were
the same in every church and chapel of the West. The
universities were international institutions ; a national
university would have seemed a poor and narrow
thing, and academic organisation was based upon
the idea that at least four nations would be represented
in each university. Even the wars of the Middle
Ages were not national ; the greatest are the Crusades ;
then there are wars between Empire and Papacy, and
lowest of all comes the feudal strife of vassal against
vassal or vassal against his lord ; there is no really
national war before the Hundred Years' War between
England and France.
NATIONALITY 9
Religion also was cosmopolitan ; the Church uni-
versal was visible as well as invisible. It had divisions
of course. There were laymen and priests, secular
priests and regulars, monks and friars. But the
sections were horizontal, not vertical ; they ran all
through Western Christendom, and did not divide it
into geographical parts. The monastic orders were
peculiarly international ; the whole world was their
parish ; their general chapters were cosmopolitan
parliaments ; and the rigidity of their international
character brought them into sharp collision with the
rising national spirit of the sixteenth century, and
made them the first spoils of the Reformation.
The change from this partially-realised ideal of
unity to the modern diversity of national tongues
and national churches, national laws and national
liberties, is the greatest factor in the evolution of
modern from medieval history. We may express it
by means of a diagram.
England.
France.
Germany.
Spain.
Folkright.
Feudal Custom.
Civil Law.
Canon Law.
io FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Take the feudal, civil, and canonical varieties of
medieval law and custom. They are separated from
one another by horizontal lines, which spread all over
Western Europe, recognising no distinction of nation-
ality. So with ecclesiastical institutions, dogma and
ritual, seculars and regulars, monks and friars. But
what happens ? Imperceptibly vertical lines begin to
traverse the horizontal lines. Feudal custom in
England is differentiated from feudal custom in
France ; for instance, by the Salisbury oath of 1086
William the Conqueror makes every man's duty to his
king superior to his duty to his lord. Canon law is
limited in England where it is not limited abroad ; for
instance, in 1236 the English barons refuse to assimi-
late the laws of England to those of the Church
universal with respect to the legitimation of bastards
by the subsequent marriage of the parents. English
common law l modifies and moulds all other kinds of
laws. As the vertical lines get deeper, the horizontal
lines tend to become obliterated, and feudal custom,
civil law and canon law, tend to become merged in
national systems of English, French, German, and
Spanish law. In the sixteenth century, the canon
law, so far as it is not embedded in the common law,
becomes binding on the laity only inforo conscientiae.
The struggle between the civil and the common law is
more prolonged and calls for treatment later on. But
eventually they too are merged in a national system.
1 Common law is the one law which is not common over Western
Europe, but is common over all classes in England. It is the law of the
Curia Regis, and is the first kind of national law.
NATIONALITY 11
In the same way the somewhat obscure vertical line
between the Church in England and the Church
abroad grows clear and sharp, and the horizontal lines
grow dim. There is no room in an aggressively
national system for international institutions which
refuse to compromise their universal character, and
the monks and friars disappear. The Thirty-Nine
Articles are not the articles of any but the Anglican
Church ; the Book of Common Prayer is its unique and
priceless property. The Church in England has been
nationalised ; it has become the Church of England.
It is the same abroad : cujus regio, ejus religio was the
maxim of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) in which the
territorial princes of Germany asserted the fact that
they had conquered in the Church as well as in the State.
Language and literature, too, become nationalised.
We can scarcely say that either a national language
or a national literature existed in England before the
fourteenth century, before the days of Langland, of
Wycliffe, and of Chaucer. For Anglo-Saxon is not
English, nor is it literature. A national German
language and literature arise about the same time.
French, Italian, and Spanish are perhaps earlier,
because less original. The Bible is translated into
these vernacular tongues, and is nationalised : it is no
longer the same in England, France, Germany, and
Spain : and the more idiomatic the translation, the
more popular it becomes. Luther's New Testament
and the Authorised Version of the English Bible
would never have been great national forces had they
been exactly alike. Universities lose their cosmo-
12 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
politan character, and for the time suffer severely by
the change : indeed they rarely flourish amid national
animosities. So, too, patriotism began to invade the
schoolroom, and in Queen Elizabeth's reign 'we find
the author of De Proeliis Anglornm — a sort of sixteenth
century Deeds that won the Empire — writing to Burghley
to point out how much better it would be for English
schoolboys to study his book than Ovid's Metamor-
phoses. He actually obtained an advertisement from the
Privy Council, but nations had not yet invented national
anthems. They began in the eighteenth century, a
fact which possibly led an eminent statesman to
declare that before that age patriotism did not exist.
From these illustrations of the working of the
nationalist and separatist spirit we must turn to a
more difficult question. It is comparatively easy to
see the horizontal lines of medieval unity dissolving
behind the vertical lines of national diversity : and
there is not much difficulty in discovering that the
emphasis of the latter tended to obliterate the former.
But it is not so simple to explain why or how these
nationalising forces grew, why the national prevailed
over the universal, and the centrifugal over the centri-
petal. There is one obvious and facile answer —
national character. But the obvious is always super-
ficial, and the facile is generally false. National
character, as Professor Maitland has satirically pointed
out, is a wonder-working spirit at the beck and call of
every embarrassed historian, a sort of deus ex machina,
which is invoked to settle any problem which cannot
readily be solved by ordinary methods of rational
NATIONALITY 13
investigation. The rule of the game seems to be,
' when in doubt, play National Character.' It is assumed
to be a fixed and permanent force slowly perhaps,
but surely, moulding national institutions, shaping
national ends, and working out the national destiny.
It existed, presumably, from the beginning, and to it
are ascribed all national differences. Is liberty the
predominant feature of the English constitution and
governmental privilege of the French? It is due to
national character. ' When Britain first at Heaven's
command arose from out the azure main,' it received a
charter and a double dose of original independence.
When France began to drag out its miserable exist-
ence, its people received a double dose of original
servility, and a charter which made each Frenchman
equal to about one third of an Englishman. The idea
was older than ' Rule Britannia ! ' * We must fight it
out ' exclaimed the disappointed and dispossessed
peasants, who rebelled in 1549, 'or be brought into like
slavery that the Frenchmen are in' We do not use the
word slavery nowadays when speaking of the French,
but we often mean much the same thing; and it is an
article of the Englishman's creed that whatever differ-
ences exist between England and the continent are
due to the inherent and ineradicable superiority of
English national character.
But what is this national character ? Where does it
come from? from our Celtic, our German, or our
Norse ancestors? Or is it due to none of these pure
brands, but to the extraordinary virtue of a very
special blend? The first and most persistent confu-
14 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
sion which meets us in this discussion is the identifica-
tion of nationality with race. Now race is one of the
vaguest words in the language. We use it to dis-
tinguish men from other animals, and speak of the
human race. We use it to differentiate various
branches of the human family, and speak of the
Aryan, Semitic, and other races. We employ it for
further subdividing Aryans into Teutonic and Celtic
races, for subdividing Teutonic races into English,
German, Dutch, and Norse: and we even talk of
English-speaking races, American, Canadian, Aus-
tralian, and Afrikander. Race in fact may mean half
a dozen kinds of subdivision, so that it cannot possibly
be the cause of any one of those subdivisions, and we
do not get much further in our analysis of nationality
by identifying it with race.
There is another bar to the identification. A Jew
can no more change his race than an Ethiopian can
his skin, but he can assume English, French, or
American nationality with very little trouble. Nation-
ality is a coat which can rapidly be turned. A few
years ago an alien was a candidate for the House of
Commons : he was of German nationality two days
before his nomination : nine days later he was a
patriotic British M.P. The variety of races which
constitute British nationality is astonishing. 'Saxon,
or Norman, or Dane are we ' sang Tennyson : but the
exigencies of time, space, and metre prevented him from
giving an exhaustive list. We are also Scots, Irish,
Welsh, German, French, Spaniards and Italians — not
to mention the lost Ten Tribes. From the days of
NATIONALITY 15
Simon de Montfort downwards many of the most
distinguished British patriots have not been British in
race. Merely to recall names like Disraeli, Bentinck,
Keppel, Romilly, Goschen, Vanbrugh, Panizzi, Rossetti,
Rothschild indicates the debt we owe in the sphere of
law and letters, politics, art, and finance, to men of
alien race ; and it is a well-known fact that nearly all
great English musicians have been Germans, and most
great English painters Dutch. It is well for our
national achievement that we have had no prohibitive
tariff on the import of alien immigrants.
Nor are we peculiar in this respect. Natives of the
British Isles have helped to create the armies and
fleets, and to build up the polities of most European
states. In the eighteenth century you might have
found one Irishman directing as prime minister the
fortunes of Spain, and another those of Naples, a third
commanding the forces of Austria, and a fourth seek-
ing to rebuild the French dominion in India. Scots
as a rule restricted their attentions to Protestant
countries, but John Law in the early years of that
century did wonderful things with French finance.
The right-hand man of Frederick the Great was a
Scot, and Scots took more than their share in the
making of Russia — an article of almost exclusively
foreign manufacture. Peter the Great himself had a
mother of Scottish birth, and the fact made all the
difference between him and his imbecile half-brothers.
Catherine the Great was a German. Napoleon himself
was not a Frenchman by race : one of his marshals, an
Italian, became King of Sweden, and founded the
16 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
present Swedish line of monarchs. The Kings of
Italy come from Savoy, and the Kings of Spain are
Bourbons, and the Kings of Belgium were made in
Saxe-Coburg. Even in England we have had no
kings of exclusively English race since the Battle of
Hastings. The conquering Normans were succeeded
by the Plantagenets who came from Anjou. The
Tudors descended on England from the mountains
of Wales, and the Stuarts from over the Tweed : and
our last royal families come from Brunswick and Saxe-
Coburg-Gotha.
Nationality then is something more and something
less than race. It is mutable : it is complex : and
compared with race it is modern. English national
character did not exist when our Teutonic forebears
left the shores of Germany. The tribes, which
migrated, were no more distinct from those which
stayed behind than the Pilgrim Fathers were from
the Puritans of the Long Parliament. The differences
between English and German history are not due to
original differences of national character, any more
than are the differences between English and American
history. In both cases the different national character
is due to the different environment and history. A
scientist made the same point the other day, when he
asserted that environment was stronger than heredity.
Nationality is the effect, rather than the cause, of
history, though in its turn it does affect the course
of history. It is not a thing to be assumed with-
out discussion or proof like the definitions of
Euclid : it is a mass of acquired characteristics, each
NATIONALITY 17
of which has its definite and more or less ascertainable
causes.
We go back to the earliest records the peoples of
Western Europe. That does not take us back to their
beginnings ; for anthropologists, who burrow in barrows
and caves, tell us that tens of centuries of human
development and differentiation had rolled by be-
fore the earliest record appears. But the light in
these barrows and caves is dim, and their evidence
doubtful. The historian cannot go far beyond Caesar
for the beginnings of modern Gaul, nor beyond Tacitus
for those of modern Germany and England : and the
first appearance of modern peoples upon the stage of
history is in the rdle of wanderers, having the slightest
connection with the soil. Such property as they
have is easily moved — and lifted. Their pursuits are
pastoral, not agricultural, because flocks are much
more mobile than crops ; and primitive man is always
on the move. The soil is no bond and no tie : it has
no associations for them. Sentiment does not differen-
tiate one land from another, but only its fertility and
accessibility. Their relations are personal, not terri-
torial : they are kinsmen rather than neighbours, and
the word ' neighbour ' comes comparatively late into
the language, not until the system of 'borh' has re-
placed the kin, and territorial proximity has supplanted
the proximity of blood.
This is the first great revolution in human affairs
with which we have to deal. For causes, at which we
can only guess, the wanderers weary of wandering and
make for themselves that novel thing, a home. They
B
i8 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
settle on "the soil, and the soil grips them. Their
abode becomes fixed, and so does their horizon. They
build huts and they plough the land : their property is
no longer movable, and they are tied to the spot on
which they live. Their bonds are with those who live
near : these may be kinsmen, and no doubt are at first.
But they need not be : the stranger within the gates
becomes neighbour, and the bonds with distant kins-
men relax. Territorial proximity replaces that of
blood as the basis of human society. Then the genius
loci casts its spell over the immigrants : it includes the
effects of climate and the results of previous occu-
pation. The immigrants into Celtic and Roman
Britain will not be the same as if they had remained
in Teutonic Germany. The Ostrogoth who conquers
Italy becomes an Italian, the Visigoth who conquers
Spain becomes a Spaniard : the Frank who settles in
France becomes a Frenchman, while he who remains
at home continues a German : the Norman who con-
quers England becomes English, and he who conquers
Sicily, Sicilian. Subtler still is the influence of climate
and geographical conditions ; and hence the value of
historical geography. We have been told — I know
not with how much truth — that the Yankee is develop-
ing the same features, the high cheek-bones, the
prominent nose, the straight lank hair, and even some-
what of the colour of the American Indians whom he
displaced. We can see under our eyes the process of
intellectual and moral differentiation. There are three
Englishmen : one stays at home, one goes to Australia,
and one to Canada. Twenty years pass, one has
NATIONALITY 19
become a Canadian, another an Australian, and the
first alone remains an Englishman. The differentia-
tion, once begun, proceeds at a growing pace ; and the
task of reconciling the new nationalities with the old
Imperial unity is the hardest problem of politics.
It is this association of men with different parts of
the earth's surface which begins the process of differ-
entiating modern nations from one another, and drives
vertical national lines down through the horizontal
cosmopolitan lines. But the common ideas which the
immigrants take to the various localities combine at
first with the influence of the soil to produce similar
institutions. Feudalism is more or less common to the
whole of Western Europe : the soil becomes the basis
and badge of social position in France as well as in
England. Everywhere the territorial supersedes the
personal relationship, and the kings become owners of
land rather than lords of people. Alfred the Great
is not King of Wessex, but of the West Saxons, and
William the Conqueror is King of the English, not
King of England. To call him King of England is as
wrong as to call the Kaiser Emperor of Germany :
for the territorial sovereign in Saxony is not Kaiser
Wilhelm, but Konig Friedrich August. It is only
with John that the King of the English becomes King
of England, and the substitution of the territorial for
the personal sovereignty is officially recognised.
The change is expressed in many ways. In Eng-
land the ' hundred ' and the ' tithing,' originally
groups of persons, become geographical terms. In
France public functions are transformed into local
20 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
divisions : the bailliage, originally the office of bailli,
is soon a portion of territory. The county, at first the
office of count, acquires a geographical meaning. Law
itself becomes local : it had been as mobile as pro-
perty, and each tribe carried with it its personal law
wherever it went. The Ostrogoths and Lombards
carried Teutonic law into Italy, the Visigoths into
Spain, the Franks into Gaul, and the Angles and
Saxons into Britain. But it comes under local influ-
ence, splits into hundreds of local customs, and
becomes territorial. The law of persons becomes the
law of the land. Men no longer carry about their
own legal atmosphere : they have to breathe that of
the land whither they go.
This * territorialism,' as it is called, is the great bar
to national unity. Indeed, national unity is a con-
ception far beyond the reach of men's minds in early
times. How do we know that we are a nation and
an Empire ? Well, we have the Daily Mail to tell us
so, and The Times and other Atlases with maps all
coloured red. But the Anglo-Saxons had no half-
penny or any other papers to tell them how great they
were, or how little : they could not read or write, and
they would quite have failed to understand a map.
They had ceased to wander as tribes, and had not yet
begun to travel as individuals. All these means for
the expansion of men's consciousness were wanting.
Their horizon was limited by what they saw, and not
expanded by what they imagined. Their patriotism
centred round the parish pump or its equivalent. The
' best ' men of the township and the hundred travelled
NATIONALITY 21
further afield, and had some conception of tribal unity
as represented by the shire-moot : but the Anglo-
Saxons never got beyond provincial patriotism, and
the old English monarchy was never more than a
federation of tribal commonwealths, loosely bound to-
gether for purposes of mutual defence. The Norman
Conquest first imposed some sort of national unity,
and Henry Il.'s Curia Regis some sort of national
law : but the consciousness of this unity was for ages
limited to the king and his entourage, to the Curia
Regis and the royal officials. Even after Parliament
appears, the greatest difficulty is to make it national,
and to bring home to the constituencies a sense of
their national duties. Representation was regarded as
a burden right down to the sixteenth century, both
by electors and elected. On one occasion the elected
knights for Oxfordshire fled the country to escape the
honour. The sheriff* raised the hue and cry and pur-
sued them like thieves and murderers. One was
caught and bound over to appear at Westminster when
Parliament should assemble, but the other escaped ;
and it was the Tudors who first inoculated Parliament
with a really national consciousness.
Local interests are potent in the Middle Ages : they
hampered the growth of national feeling, but they
were less incompatible than national unity with a
wider, if more shadowy, universal unity. There is
more room for local option in a universal than in a
national church : and the idea of universal empire
was only possible before the era of national consolida-
tion. It is the consolidation of national unity, the
22 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
expansion of a local and provincial into a national
patriotism, which proves fatal to both the concrete
expressions of unity of the world : to the Empire and
to the Papacy. England led the way in this process
of nationalisation, because Nature had done most of
the work by giving England frontiers which no man
could change. It was easy to see the geographical
limits of English nationality : it was not so easy to trace
those of France or Germany, and even now they are
not defined beyond cavil. England was almost a
water-tight compartment, and within it the elements
fused more speedily than over a wider expanse. The
cosmopolitan connections of its Angevin kings intro-
duced, it is true, alien elements, Savoyards, Poitevins
Gascons : but the reaction against their dominion in
the thirteenth century developed English national
consciousness, just as the English attempt to conquer
France in the Hundred Years' War provoked the
growth of French nationality.
This movement made the fourteenth century the
first epoch of English nationalism. It has been called
the * age of the commons ' : that is because it is the
age of the nation. Its battles are fought with a
national weapon, the long bow (since become the
national weapon of the Americans): its wars are
financed by the national wealth of the wool-trade :
its armies are formed, not of feudal knights or foreign
mercenaries, but by national and voluntary enlistment :
and its navy begins at Sluys the national achievements
at sea which roll on in triumph to Trafalgar. Political
songs show a popular interest in public affairs, and
NATIONALITY 23
popular feeling is voiced in the poems of Chaucer and
Langland, in the tracts and translations of Wycliffe.
The House of Commons emerges, and asserts its
control over legislation, taxation, and administration.
' What touches all must be approved of all ' is the
maxim : and although its application was partial,
although the House of Commons is an aristocracy,
Parliament is at least more national than it had been
before. The advent of the middle class has begun,
and middle classes are more national than feudal
barons : national consciousness has reached the heart,
and fired the imagination of the burgess and the
gentleman, though it may not yet have touched the
stolid mind of the peasant.
England has begun to differ from other countries,
and different environment and institutions will produce
different habits of mind, and eventually a different
national character. But the process is slow and
gradual : the characteristics are not all acquired at
once. The Church in England is still much the same
as the Church anywhere else in Western Christendom.
But there are signs of the coming break. At the
Councils of Constance and Basle in the first half of
the fifteenth century, the reform movement fails
because the Papacy can play off national jealousies.
England and Germany side against France, Spain, and
Italy ; and foreshadow the religious divisions of the
following century. The Papacy itself becomes im-
possible as lord of the Church universal, because the
local and pagan spirit of Italy has laid unclean and
impious hands on the Vicar of Christ, and Wycliffe
24 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
had taught that dominion depended on Grace. The
storm came in the sixteenth century : the national
State took hold of the Church and made it national
too. This, in its turn, was a fresh cause of the differ-
entiation of national character. Englishmen, nurtured
on Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, on Foxe's Book
of Martyrs , and on the Geneva version of the Bible,
grew very different from what they would have been,
had they continued to assimilate the Vulgate, the
Roman breviary, and the Legenda Aurea. English
Puritanism came into the world, and no factor has
been more potent in moulding English destinies and
character.
One indirect and undesigned effect was the founda-
tion of Greater Britain over the seas : and this again
has expanded national character. Doubtless there
was evil as well as good in the influence which the
possession of Empire had exerted over the national
mind. Nabobs and corruption invaded the British
Parliament, at the same time that its sense of
responsibility was broadened and deepened by the
growth of obligations to other races and inferior
civilisations ; and South African wealth has not been
an unmixed blessing in English politics. But it would
never have been possible for us to call ourselves an
imperial race, had we not possessed an Empire : and
that Empire we did not seek with deliberate intent.
Religious enthusiasm founded the American colonies ;
commercial enterprise brought back India in its train.
The ambition to make the British Empire the greatest
secular agency for good is perhaps the noblest of
NATIONALITY 25
national characteristics : but it is the latest-born child
of national history, and was not the cause of Empire.
And so we come round to our original thesis : nation-
ality and national character are the results as well as,
if not rather than, the causes of history. We did not
start with a national character : we developed one
under the stress of circumstances. Environment bred
certain acts and classes of acts ; acts developed into
habits and customs ; and habits and custom made and
moulded our national character.
26 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
II
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
A FEW months ago a head-master, who was also a
classical scholar, was giving his views on the teaching
of history ; and he laid it down that any classical
scholar could teach history if he were given a week's
notice. That dictum reminds me of another opinion,
which was expressed by an undergraduate : he re-
marked that the great thing about history was that
it required no thinking. Now I think we must com-
bine these two answers in order to understand them ;
and we may assume that, in the opinion of these two
experts, it is because history requires no thinking that
any classical scholar can teach it after a week's notice.
The two answers taken together also explain a fact,
which has always puzzled me when examining for
Matriculation, School Leaving, and Oxford Local Ex-
aminations; and it now appears that the appalling
ignorance of history displayed by candidates may be
due to the circumstance that they had been taught
by classical scholars getting up history at a week's
notice.
Now, I have no doubt that what this head-master
meant by history can be taught by a classical scholar
at a week's notice ; because that kind of history does
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 27
require no thinking. To him history is obviously a
matter of dates and facts to be learned by heart, and
nothing more. But if we were to ask him why there
was a Renaissance or a Reformation, why England
is English and Scotland is Scottish, why the Spanish
Empire decayed and the British Empire developed ;
if one were even to put some simpler requests, such
as 'contrast the nature of the evidence upon which
ancient and modern history depend'; or, 'compare
the value of the chronicle and the record as sources
of history,' I think we should have to wait some-
what longer than a week before we got a satisfac-
tory answer, even from a classical scholar. I even
doubt whether a week's research would enable him
to state the nature of the difficulties which faced
Oliver Cromwell or explain the reasons of his com-
parative failure and success. Real history has to
deal with the problems which have baffled statesmen
and thinkers throughout the ages, and the mental
equipment required for the adequate discharge of that
function is seldom found, and is only acquired at the
cost of infinite patience and toil. To pretend that any
classical scholar can acquire it in a week is simply
to evince an abysmal ignorance of what history really
is or really should be.
Now, there are three or four different kinds of
questions which every student of history is called upon
to answer, some of them elementary, some profound :
there is the question when ? and the question where ?
the question how? and the question why? The
question when ? is the most elementary and the least
28 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
informing of all historical interrogations. That may
sound strange to those who are in the habit of regard-
ing history as mainly a matter of dates. But dates per
se are almost useless ; by themselves, they are merely
mental lumber. It may be said that the knowledge
of a single accurate date has a certain educational
value deriving from its exactitude ; and an extravagant
importance is often attached to children's knowing
that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 and the
battle of Waterloo in 1815. It may be some corrective
of this view, and some inducement to temper justice
with mercy in dealing with infants ignorant of these
details, if we remember that, as a matter of sheer
chronological fact, the battle of Hastings was not
fought in 1066, nor that of Waterloo in 1815. For
the Christian era is at least four years out of the true
reckoning, and all events dated anno domini are to
that extent wrong. Numberless accepted dates are still
more erroneous. You may remember that elaborate
preparations were made in 1901 to celebrate the
thousandth anniversary of the death of Alfred the
Great ; on the eve of the celebration a profound but
mischievous scholar, without any consideration for the
feelings of the organisers of this millenary demonstra-
tion, proved that Alfred really died in 899 or 900 at
the latest, and that the demonstrators were two years
after the fair.
The same uncertainty exists with regard to nearly
all dates before the Norman Conquest, and a good
many afterwards ; even so late as the eleventh century
the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, almost a contemporary
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 29
authority, is some years out in the date it assigns to
Canute's visit to Rome. So that whatever value
attaches to the committing to memory of these dates
must be independent of their scientific exactitude.
Dates in fact are valuable not in themselves but only
in so far as they enable us to determine the sequence
of events, for the sequences are an indispensable factor
in ascertaining the causes of history. The mere re-
petition of dates without reference to their use and
meaning involves a repellent waste of time and temper.
The question where ? is really more important than
the question when ? ; and it is a much more searching
test of a student's understanding of history to inquire
where the battle of Blenheim was fought, than when
it was fought. Yet I am afraid that for every ten, who
could answer the second question, scarce one could
be found to answer the first. And among the reforms
to be effected in the methods of teaching history
none is more urgent than a proper appreciation of
historical geography, and a proper use of historical
wall-maps.
The next question is that of how ?, and this is the
subject of nearly all our histories. Few students have
yet set themselves systematically to answer the most
difficult and most profound of all historical questions,
the question why? We take the things for granted,
and are content with the outward manifestation, with-
out troubling ourselves about the soul of things which
causes those manifestations. Columbus, we know,
discovered America in 1492 ; we accept that as a
sufficient statement and proceed to treat it as the
30 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
origin of New World history, and as one of the
principal factors which differentiate the modern from
the medieval world. But why did Columbus discover
America ? why was America discovered towards the
end of the fifteenth, and not at the end of the fourteenth
or sixteenth centuries? Why does modern, as distinct
from medieval, history begin where it does, and not
at any other time? This is the sort of problem we
should try to solve ; compared with it, questions of
when, where, and how are almost trivial. History
can, perhaps, be little more than a story for children,
but there is a time when sober students should put
away childish things, or at least cease to regard them
as a final object of intellectual effort.
Now, it is not possible to solve these problems
completely. History is not an exact science. Nothing
that is real and concrete can be exact. Mathematics
are exact, but only because they deal with abstractions.
Two may be equal to two in arithmetic, but they are
generally unequal in real life ; no two men are exactly
equal to two other men. The same may be predicted
about other live and real things ; and there is no
necessary correlation between two pence and two
politicians, except the abstract numerical identity.
There is always a gulf between the thing and the
mathematical expression of it. By mathematics you
can prove that Achilles, moving ten times faster than
a tortoise, never overtakes it, if the tortoise has ten
yards start ; for while Achilles does ten yards, the
tortoise does one ; while Achilles does one, the tortoise
does a tenth, and so on. And, however minutely you
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 31
subdivide the distance between the two, you cannot
get rid of it by mathematical means. But in real
life Achilles disposes of the difficulty without much
trouble. A line is said to be length without breadth,
and Euclid does not say that this is absurd. But it is ;
for a line without breadth cannot be seen, drawn, or
imagined, and certainly never existed. The mathe-
matical plane is unreal ; to reach it you must leave the
realm of reality. When once you have risen to this
exalted level, you may be as abstract, as absolute, and
as exact as you please. But the truth that deals with
concrete things is always relative ; absolute truth is an
abstract ideal not attained in practical human affairs,
and therefore not attainable in their history. History
deals with an infinite number of variant facts, just as
grammar does with an infinite number of variant uses ;
generalisations deduced from these facts, like gram-
matical rules deduced from these uses, are all incom-
plete, and partially false ; there are exceptions to every
rule.
With this reminder of the tentative and halting
nature of all answers to the question why ? of history,
I want to suggest some reasons why modern history,
as distinct from medieval, begins towards the end of
the fifteenth century. I am obliged to insert the
qualifying clause ' as distinct from mediaeval history/
because our terminology is very loose. Commonly
modern is merely distinguished from ancient history,
and includes medieval ; and there is infinite variety of
dates at which the commencement of modern history
has been placed. Some say that modern history does
32 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
not really begin until the French Revolution ; some
date it from Luther's Ninety-five Theses, some from
Charles Vlll.'s invasion of Italy in 1494, some from
Columbus's discovery of the New World. Others go
back to the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, to the
death of Romulus Augustulus in 476, to the battle of
Actium in B.C. 31, or even to the death of Alexander
the Great in B.C. 323. Others, again, insisting on the
unity of history, deprecate any division into ancient
and modern as artificial. But man cannot recognise
in practice the unity of Time ; even a lecture must
have an artificial beginning, though it may seem to
have no natural end. So, in history, one must start
somewhere, remembering always that our starting-
points are artificial ; and the line — blurred and waver-
ing though it be — between medieval and modern
history is as good a starting-point as any.
Lord Acton makes a bolder assertion : to him this
line is clear. * The modern age/ he writes, ' did not
proceed from the medieval by normal succession, with
outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded,
it founded a new order of things, under a law of inno-
vation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity.' 1
With all due deference to so high an authority, I
believe this to be an exaggeration. To my mind, at
least, the history of the world presents itself as a series
of dissolving views, rather than as a succession of
separate lantern slides ; new light dawns on the screen
before the old fades away. Causes are none the less
real because they have no fuglemen; the present is
1 Lord Acton, Inaugural Lecture 1895, p. 8.
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 33
none the less rooted in the past because roots are
commonly concealed, and the foundations of modern,
were laid in medieval, history.
Like most natural processes, the transition was
silent, gradual, and in its origin, imperceptible. Who
can say precisely when the new bud begins to sap the
old leaf on the tree ? Two generations ago geologists,
impressed by the vast and sudden inequalities which
make and mar the beauty of the surface of the earth,
imagined in the early history of the globe a series of
terrific upheavals. Only sudden and tremendous
catastrophes could account for precipitous phenomena.
Their reason was too much dominated by the outward
manifestation ; and erroneous notions of the earth's
age led them to compress within a moment the
changes of an aeon. A more scientific spirit ascribes
these features to silent causes working slowly through
a multitude of ages ; and recourse has been had to the
older, truer view that natura nihil facit per saltum.
It is just as true in history. There have been
changes, sudden in their outward manifestations. The
French Revolution is a more striking example of them
than the transition from medieval to modern history.
But even the French Revolution was the summation of
causes, which had been working for ages ; even here it
is true to say that natura nihil facit per saltum. The
French Revolution was a high jump rather than a long
jump ; and the French people, in spite of their deter-
mination to cut themselves off the soil on which they
had grown, came down from their leap not very far
from where they started. The real progress of man
C
34 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
often varies inversely with the noise it makes in the
world, and with the attention it receives from historians.
The outlines of modern history had been fixed before
men were conscious that the medieval world was
passing away ; events do not move as a rule until the
direction which they will take has been roughly deter-
mined. Men remain where they are until it has been
suggested to them that they would be better some-
where else ; and this suggestion is more important
than the mere mechanical movement of men in the
direction suggested.
Answers to questions why? can only therefore be
found in the antecedents of the developments under
consideration ; and if we want to know why the
Reformation took place in the sixteenth century, why
America was discovered in 1492, why learning came
to its new birth at the end of the fifteenth century, we
must search the records of preceding generations. No
period has been more undeservedly neglected. Even
the Dictionary of National Biography contains fewer
names from the fifteenth than from the fourteenth
century, and thrice as many sixteenth as fifteenth
century worthies are buried in its covers. The outward
manifestations of the sixteenth century have attracted
the popular gaze : it is time that students paid more
attention to the predestinating causes of the fourteenth
and early fifteenth. It is time that we ceased to
regard the Renaissance, the discovery of the New
World, the Reformation, and the development of
nationality as the merely first links of chains sus-
pended in mid-air, and began to regard them rather
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 35
as links indissolubly bound to old chains which stretch
back far into the past. They were goals as well as
starting-points ; they sum up old series as well as
begin new ones ; and my immediate object is to attach
some parts of modern to medieval history, and to
illustrate the greatest of all historic truths, namely,
that the present is bound up with the past.
I have already attempted to show how the idea of
nationality, growing up during the Middle Ages, helped
to differentiate modern from medieval history. That
is perhaps the weightiest factor in this revolution.
We will now take one or two others, and first ask why
it was that America was discovered towards the end
of the fifteenth century. A short answer would be
the paradoxical assertion that Columbus discovered
America in 1492 or thereabouts because the Turks are
an obstructive people. The connection is not quite
obvious ; but obvious connections are always super-
ficial, and this connection is more profound. The
Germans have a proverb Der Mensch ist was er isst —
man is what he eats. It might be taken for a motto
by those people who believe in the economic interpre-
tation of history ; and, while that interpretation has been
pushed to extremes, it undoubtedly contains a kernel
of much neglected truth. No age and no nation has
been quite independent of its food ; even fasting
anchorites required interludes of eating to keep them
going in their fasts, and death by starvation does not
appear to have been regarded as the logical crown of
holy life. In the Middle Ages each country was more
or less self-supporting so far as necessaries were con-
36 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
cerned ; hrut for an ever-increasing number of luxuries
they wer^e dependent upon foreign trade. The great
medieval trade routes passed from East to West and
West t/b East through the Levant. Now, so long as the
Levant was shared between the Byzantine Empire, the
Italjfe;anS) anc| {fog Saracens — a cultured and tolerant
?:e — there was no great obstacle in the way of this
e. But in the fourteenth and early fifteenth
Centuries the Turks, a destructive race, came and
* squatted ' on these trade routes. Western Europe
soon began to feel the pinch ; the arteries through
which its trade flowed were choked ; and, consciously
or unconsciously, men began to seek new routes to the
East — routes by which the interrupted communications
might be restored.
This was the motive of all the geographical ex-
pansion of the fifteenth century. The discovery of a
New World, the foundation of colonies, the develop-
ment of sea-power were incidental results. Each
nation was merely intent upon opening up a new
channel through which the wealth from the Indies- —
that is, of course, the East Indies — might flow into its
coffers. Even this commercial motive was perhaps un-
conscious ; the new idea invariably appears in an
ancient guise, and the earliest commercial voyages
may have been undertaken under the impression that
they were crusades. Portugal was the first to start,
and from its geographical position it inevitably sought
to find a route round the south of Africa. Prince
Henry the Navigator — we should now call him rather
a company-promoter — was the pioneer of these en-
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 37
deavours ; and step by step the exploration of the
African coast was pushed further and further south.
For sixty years from 1426 this process went on. It
was no single event, and during this period the com-
mercial motive cast off the crusading shell. But
Africa was bigger than men thought ; it extended
hundreds of miles further south than Prince Henry
imagined ; and before Diaz doubled the Cape of Good
Hope in 1486, it had probably occurred to others that
there might be a shorter route to the Indies. This
was the idea of Christopher Columbus ; he sailed due
west, discovered the West Indies, and to the day of
his death was unconscious of the magnitude of his
achievement. He thought that, instead of discovering
a New World, he had merely turned the flank of the
Turk and found a fresh route to the East of the Old
World.
Other nations followed in the wake of the Portuguese,
and the fruits of Columbus's discoveries fell to the
Spaniards, under the auspices of whose monarchs his
voyages had been made. But, while Spain developed
an empire in the West, Albuquerque founded one for
Portugal in the East. England and France were later
and less fortunate in their early adventures. Their eyes
turned north rather than south, and many English lives
were lost in the Arctic Ocean. Englishmen went forth,
not to find the North Pole, but first a North-east and
then a North-west passage to the Indies ; and though
this quest was hopeless, yet British dominion in Canada
was an indirect result of their enterprise. That was still
in the womb of the distant future, but other effects of
38 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
these discoveries were no less great and more im-
mediate. The world was suddenly expanded and its
centre shifted. Hitherto the world had been little
more than the countries round the Mediterranean.
Jewish religion, Greek culture, Roman Empire had
represented the sum of human achievement, and they
all came from the borders of an inland sea. Great
Britain was the Ultima Thule, hovering on the rim of
outer darkness ; and its people were still accounted
barbarians by the polished people of Italy. Rome
was the hub of the universe, Venice and Genoa the
emporiums of its trade, and the seats of its naval
power, and Florence the home of its art and letters.
All men's eyes looked towards Italy ; but now there
came an aversion of gaze, and men's looks were turned
outwards. The Mediterranean was deposed from its
proud position. Trade and politics became oceanic
and not pelagic ; the ports on the shores of the Atlantic
were no longer outposts on the bounds of a waste,
estranging sea, but outlets towards a vast New World.
The centre was shifted to the rim ; in time Liverpool
and Hamburg will take the place of Venice and Genoa.
Medieval Empire and Papacy shivered at the blow ;
the inheritors of the new world, Spain, Portugal,
France, England, had no dependence on the Empire,
and the New World could not be forced into the strait-
waistcoat of the old. They still, it is true, depended
on the Papacy; Columbus had not called into exis-
tence a New World to redress the religious balance of
the Old. The discovery of America was not a Pro-
testant enterprise any more than the Bible is a Non-
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 39
conformist publication ; and for more than a century
after Columbus's achievement the New World was a
Roman Catholic preserve, with a few Protestant wasps
buzzing around it. Great changes take long to sink
into men's minds, and few realised the importance of
these discoveries until generations after they had
been made. But the expansion of the world slowly
produced an expansion of men's minds ; and the
ecclesiastical and theological system, adapted to men
who believed that the sun went round the earth, and
that stars twinkled solely for the benefit or amuse-
ment of the dwellers in Western Europe, began to
rend, when stretched to cover the science of the
sixteenth century ; just as some day perhaps current
beliefs will be modified by the realisation that the
earth is not the centre of the universe, and that pro-
bably there are billions of planets more important than
that on which we live.
The geographical discoveries of Columbus, Vasco da
Gama, Magellan, the Cabots, and the rest, were only
the most startling development of those economic
changes, which during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries transformed the medieval into the modern
world. They were external and obvious events ;
there were others less obvious but no less important.
These may almost all be summed up in one phrase —
the advent of the middle classes. Nearly every move-
ment of this period is a symptom of this middle-class
development. The Renaissance represents its intel-
lectual aspect ; art, science, and letters had hitherto
been ecclesiastical ; the Renaissance is a secular, and
40 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
sometimes even pagan revolt against this sacerdotal
monopoly. The Reformation is its religious counter-
part, the rebellion of the middle-class laity against the
domination by the Church over the relations between
God and man. Socially, we see rich burghers com-
peting with feudal lords for rank and title. Michael
de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, in Richard Il.'s reign, is the
first Englishman who owed his peerage to wealth
derived from trade ; knighthoods are won in the
counting-house as well as on the field of battle ; the
feudal bars of iron are broken down, and golden keys
begin to unlock the doors of office and influence. The
great ministers of Tudor times, the Cromwells, the
Cecils, the Walsinghams, all spring from the new
middle, and not the old feudal, classes ; and Queen
Elizabeth herself was great-grand-daughter of a
London merchant. Politically, this expansion shows
itself in the development of the House of Commons
at the expense of the House of Lords and of the
monarchy ; and, but for this middle-class aggression,
Charles I. would never have laid his head on the block,
nor James II. have fled beyond the sea. Economically,
the whole geographical movement, the search for new
trade routes, the foundation of great companies, the
Merchant Adventurers, the East India Company, the
Levant Company are all expressions of the growth of
a commercial middle class.
This in itself meant a revolution destructive of the
Middle Ages. We sometimes call those the feudal
ages, without perhaps any very definite idea of what
feudalism was. But two things are clear enough about
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 41
feudalism. Firstly, it was a rural organisation, a
system — if anything so vague can be called a system
— based upon man's relation to the land, and regulated
by the conditions of agricultural life. There were of
course towns and cities in the Middle Ages, but they
were always exceptions to the feudal system. The
mass of the population lived in the country, not in the
towns. Secondly, feudalism contemplated, roughly,
only two classes, the lords and their villeins. Now, the
industrial and commercial system of modern history
requires two factors which feudalism did not provide ;
it requires a middle class and it requires an urban
population. Without these two there would have
been little to distinguish modern from medieval
history. Without commerce and industry there can
be no middle class ; where you had no middle class,
you had no Renaissance and no Reformation. We
find two examples in Poland and Spain. Poland was
a country whose feudal existence was, unfortunately
for it, prolonged into modern history. There were
only two classes, the peasants and the nobles ; such
commerce as there was, was carried on by aliens,
Germans and Jews ; they inhabited the cities which
were never worked into the Polish national system.
Hence it was only in the cities that the Reformation
made itself felt ; there was no Renaissance, and Poland
remained the most Catholic country in Europe with
the possible exception of Spain. And in Spain the
explanation is much the same ; fortune had done much
for Spain, and its acquisition of the New World might
have made it the greatest commercial nation in
42 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
history. But its long warfare with the Moors had
stereotyped the military, crusading, and exclusive
character of its feudal class ; the nobles declined to
adapt themselves to the commercial conditions of the
age ; Spanish industry and commerce were discouraged
by foolish pride and crushed by insane taxation, The
middle classes were denied their proper outlets for
political, social, and economic expansion ; Spain was
pauperised rather than enriched by the wealth of the
Indies ; Renaissance and Reformation found no soil
in which to take permanent root, and Spain in the
sixteenth century plunged back into the theology of
the Middle Ages.
England, on the other hand, has been for centuries
peculiarly the land of the middle classes ; they give
the tone to everything English, good or bad, and
English history has been made by its middle class to a
greater extent than the history of any other European
country. This peculiar strength of the English middle
class is a complex factor in our history, nor can it
readily be explained. We can perceive conditions
even in the Middle Ages tending to foster a strong
middle class ; but one always has the uncomfortable
suspicion that these conditions are as much the effect,
as the cause, of the strength of the middle class. One
of these circumstances is the absence of impassable
barriers between class and class in England. Here
there is not, and never has been, a nobility of blood,
whatever that particularly idiotic phrase may mean.
The younger son of a peer is a commoner, though his
blood is just as noble as that of his noble brother ; the
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 43
grandsons of peers often take their place in the upper
middle classes ; and thousands of members of the
middle class in England number peers among their
ancestors. The middle class is always being recruited
from the nobility, just as the nobility is always being
recruited from the middle class. But in Germany, for
instance, there was a great gulf fixed between the two ;
all the sons of a prince were princes, all the sons of a
knight were knights, and so on through all the aristo-
cratic ranks. Younger sons of nobles never took to
trade ; that would be dishonourable, and they took to
robbery instead ; for there was no disgrace in plundering
traders and seizing by force wealth, which it was dis-
honourable to acquire by legitimate methods. Hence,
while in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries the nobles were adapting themselves to
commercial and maritime enterprise, in Germany they
wrapt themselves up in their noble exclusiveness and
turbulence, grew prouder and poorer than ever, and
consoled themselves for their poverty by attaching an
inordinate value to their birth, and to the customs of
their class. Even in the nineteenth century a German
minister of state could not bring his wife to court,
unless she were of noble blood, and the persistence of
duelling is simply another symptom of the same class-
pride and prejudice. I took up a novel the other day
by a well-known writer and noticed a comparison
between the English and German attitude towards
duelling ; these things, it was remarked, ' do not
depend upon civilisation, since modern Germany is
probably more civilised than modern England. They
44 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
depend upon national character.'1 National char-
acter, we know, is a convenient deus ex machina ; but
duelling is a class, and not a national, characteristic.
Its prevalence in Germany is due partly to the rigidity
and exclusiveness of the aristocratic sentiment which
has not been pervaded and civilised by middle-class
opinion, and partly to the fact that no strong central
monarchy, based on the middle class, arose in
Germany to deal with feudal turbulence, for duelling
is simply the last surviving form of the private warfare
of the Middle Ages. The middle class in Germany
received no reinforcements from the upper ; the landed
gentry remained isolated from the city magnates, and
class divisions deferred for centuries the realisation of
German unity, and its start in the national race for
Empire.
This absence of social castes likewise fostered the
growth of self-government in England. The strength
of the English House of Commons and the weakness
of the third estate in the medieval constitutions of
Europe both arise from a similar contrast. The
strength of the House of Commons depended on the
union in it of the landed gentry, the knights of the
shires, and the borough and city members. Now, the
knights of the shires were the barones minores, the
lesser tenants-in-chief ; there was no distinction in
class or kind between them and the barones majores,
who formed the House of Lords ; and on the continent
the barones minores clung to their class and formed the
noble estate. In England they threw in their lot
1 F. Marion Crawford, Greiffenstein.
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 45
with the burghers of the House of Commons, and the
middle class was reinforced by the landed gentry. To
this combination is due the predominance of the
House of Commons, and the victory of Parliament
over the Crown. Everywhere else the monarchy
played upon the jealousy between the three estates,
and made itself absolute through their divisions. The
depth of those divisions, and the inability of one class
in France to co-operate with another, made the
Bourbon despotism possible and excusable, though
its failure to remove them involved it ultimately in
fearful destruction. In England alone the middle
classes were not hemmed in by impassable barriers ;
in England alone was their development a peaceful
transformation, and the comparative facility with
which these transformations are made has been the
making of England. Her constitution is organic,
not cut and dried ; it grew and was not manufactured ;
it is not tied up by knots and definitions ; it is not
obliged to burst because it wants to expand. Of
course it is illogical, vague, flexible ; but that very
adaptability, which has enabled despotism and demo-
cracy to employ the same constitutional forms, has
rendered violent revolutions as a rule unnecessary.
And, if England is destined to turn into a social
democracy, the transformation will be accomplished
by the same gradual, legitimate, and peaceful methods
as those by which feudal England was converted into
a commercial, middle-class community.
The flexibility of English social and constitutional
arrangements was, then, the great condition facilitating
46 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
the growth of the middle classes ; but it did not cause
that growth. Its origin was in the revival of trade
which followed upon the settling down of Europe after
the barbarian migrations. Old trade routes were
restored, new ones discovered, and along them grew
up great cities like those along the Rhine. Com-
mercial development was followed by constitutional
growth ; these urban communities demanded a voice
in their own affairs ; and then, in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, you have the movement for the
establishment of communes, in which the management
of municipal affairs prepared the middle classes for
participation in the wider business of the nation.
England lay on the outskirts of this development,
and it was not until the end of the twelfth century
that the citizens of London purchased from Richard I.
a municipal constitution closely allied to that of
Rouen ; and other English cities were fifty years
behind the capital. The basis of English commercial
prosperity in the Middle Ages was the wool, grown
largely by the Cistercians and other monastic orders,
but handled by lay merchants. At first these mer-
chants were largely foreigners ; but with the nationalist
movement of the thirteenth century English merchants
began to oust the alien, and the expulsion of the Jews
by Edward I. threw financial business into English
hands. Then trade was developed by Edward lll.'s
conquests abroad ; naval victories secured English
shipping ; and the wine trade with Bordeaux became,
next to wool, the most flourishing branch of English
commerce.
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 47
This expansion helped to break up the rigid
manorial system, which was already decaying through
other causes. Money payments were substituted for
personal services, and the villeins slowly won emanci-
pation. Labour became mobile ; instead of being
fixed to the soil, it sought markets wherever they
could be found, and provided employers with the hands
without which the great development of capitalism
in the fifteenth century could never have taken place.
Financial speculation came into vogue ; as early as
Edward Ill.'s reign we read of a dealer who spread a
false rumour of war in order to send down the price of
wool.1 He was banished ; but the trick soon became
too familiar to involve such drastic treatment. We
hear ceaseless complaints of forestalling, regrating,
engrossing ; our respectable grocers, by the by, are
descended from the ' engrossers/ against whom Parlia-
ment from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century was
never tired of fulminating. Men began to speculate in
land and houses, to buy up whole streets and lease out
the houses on profitable terms, to accumulate farms
and to substitute cultivation on a large scale for the
piecemeal agriculture prevalent before ; and all these
processes were illustrations of the application of com-
mercial methods to the stagnant economics of the
Middle Ages. Manufactures, too, grew up ; cloth
factories, tanneries, breweries, iron mills, and a host of
others. In Elizabeth's reign, for instance, we come
across the very modern lament that England supplied
the whole world with ordnance, and would smart for it
1 D'Ewes,/<?«r«a/j, p. 166.
48 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
when this ordnance was turned against he'rself ; just as
to-day some would prohibit us from building ships for
foreign navies. So, in one way or another, before the
end of the fifteenth century a new middle class, a new
social force, had been created, and this force is one of
the greatest factors in the making of modern history.
Now commerce and industry quicken the intellect
more than agriculture ; purely agricultural counties are
to-day proverbially sleepy, and a little intellect went a
long way in the rural England of the Middle Ages.
Nobles themselves could seldom read or write, and
even a king was called ' Beauclerk ' because he pos-
sessed these two accomplishments. The man who
could write was a clerk, a cleric, that is to say an
ecclesiastic. The Church monopolised all culture, and
hence all art and science were ecclesiastical. But the
new middle-class laity, with their sharpened wits, felt a
sort of intellectual hunger, and this hunger produced
the Renaissance. The Renaissance, has of course, like
every other phenomenon, been attributed to one
sudden dramatic event, the capture of Constantinople
by the Turks ; and equally, of course, this attribution
is grossly misleading and incorrect. The revival of
letters was in full swing before 1453 ; one of the
greatest triumphs of pure scholarship, the exposure of
the forged Donation of Constantine, had been achieved
by Lorenzo Valla in 1440; Greek was being taught at
Florence as early as 1397. In art the revival had
begun even earlier ; Brunelleschi's Duomo at Florence
dates from 1410, and the great school of Flemish
painters, headed by the Van Eycks, flourished in the
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 49
fourteenth century. Nearly a dozen universities were
founded in Europe between the middle of the four-
teenth and the middle of the fifteenth centuries ; and
numbers of schools sprang up during the same period.
In our own land, Eton was founded in 1440 and
Winchester College some fifty years earlier. Scholars
no doubt fled from Constantinople, and perhaps
brought precious manuscripts with them ; but they
bulk too large -in our text-books : at the most they
only gave impetus to a movement which had begun
before their flight from the Turk. That is one of the
important facts to remember about the Renaissance ;
another is that it represented a lay and a middle-class
demand for culture, and not a revival of the ecclesias-
tical spirit.
The same two statements are likewise true of the
Reformation itself. We date it from the publication
of Luther's Ninety-five Theses in 1517. But eras can-
not be dated by years with any real accuracy ; and to
say that the Reformation began in 1517 is as mislead-
ing as to say that the Renaissance began in 1453. No
one can tell exactly when either began ; but we can
say that the beginnings of both were long before the
dramatic events by which we date them. 'With
Boniface vill./ says Bishop Creighton, ' there fell the
Mediaeval Papacy.' Now Boniface vill. died in 1304,
and in 1311 the Council of Vienne put forward the
first demand for a general reformation of the Medieval
Church. For a century and a half men were making
that demand, and expecting it to be satisfied by the
convocation of an ecumenical council. The conciliar
P
50 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
movement, as it is called, came to a head in the
councils of Constance and Basle ; but it failed because
Europe had become nationalised ; the ecumenical
machinery of the world had grown rusty, national
machinery was taking its place : and time was to prove
that only the nations could really reform the Church.
Unscrupulous Popes profited by national divisions to
balk these ecumenical councils, and every appeal from
the Pope to a Council was prohibited. The Pope
thought to make legal reform impossible, just as
James II. did, when he threw the Great Seal into the
Thames ; and the only result was to make revolution
inevitable.
That is only one factor in the genesis of the Refor-
mation, which was more than a change in church
government. It was the revolt of a laity, growing in
intelligence against ecclesiastical tutelage — a tutelage
only tolerable, then and now, when the clergy are
superior in intellect and knowledge and in character to
those over whom they claim to exercise sway. These
things were no longer an ecclesiastical monopoly ; and
conscience and wealth, intellect and pride combined in
a strange jumble of motives to repudiate a control,
which had become galling because its raison d'etre had
ceased to exist. The symbolism which had satisfied
rustic minds, because rustic minds can only grasp a
symbol, failed to satisfy the keener quest for truth
behind the ritual. Men sought out original sources
in religion as well as in scholarship, and grew impatient
of medieval glosses. Scholastic theology was attacked
by pioneers of reform a century before Luther's day.
THE ADVENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 51
4 If I had read his books before,' wrote Luther of one
of them, ' my enemies might have thought that I had
borrowed everything from him, so great is the agree-
ment between our spirits.' Popular preachers de-
nounced the vices of the age ; numerous translations of
the Scriptures into vernacular tongues were made, in
spite of the official Disapprobation of the Church ; and
there was a remarkable development of family worship.
The revival of religion was non-ecclesiastical ; and it
was one of the causes, and not one of the results, of the
Reformation.
And so, whatever factor we take in the making of
that change from medieval to modern history, whether
the growth of a middle class, geographical exploration,
economic development, the revival of letters, or of
religion, we find that the same thing is true about all.
They have their roots stretching far back into the past,
and buried far out of sight. The growth and decay
are silent, gradual, almost imperceptible. The dramatic
events which catch the eye and the ear, and by which
we date the progress or backsliding of mankind, are,
like the catastrophes which convulse the sphere of
nature, but the outward and visible manifestations of
causes, working without rest, without haste, without
conscious human direction in the making of the history
of the world.
52 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
III
THE NEW MONARCHY
IN my first lecture I drew your attention to the fact
that, whereas ancient history deals mainly with the
City-state and medieval history with the World-state,
modern history is concerned principally with the
national State ; and to-day my object is to illustrate
the development of the national State, particularly as
represented by what we call the New Monarchy. For
that is one of the prime factors in the history of the
sixteenth century. The abstract idea of the State has
been expressed in various forms ; it has been cast in
one mould after another, and so far it has found
its most complete and effective expression in the
national State. The feeling, which bound the Athenian
to the City of the Violet Crown and the Roman to the
City of the Seven Hills, now links men to their country,
the national State ; and patriotism has expanded from
a municipal into a national force. How far that
patriotism is capable of further expansion into an
imperial sentiment, and how far that sentiment is
capable of crystallisation in an imperial state is a
problem of which none of us will see the final solution.
But, into whatever form the idea has been born anew,
it has had to develop over again from the beginning,
THE NEW MONARCHY 53
and we must glance for a few minutes at the growth
of the national state until it reaches its adult stage in
the sixteenth century.
For the state in its infancy may be likened unto a
little child. It has no ideas of its own and its earliest
utterances are merely the repetition of what it has
heard. Its voice is expressed in legislation, and
some of you may have studied these early expressions
in a book called Stubbs's Select Charters. That volume
has a reputation for dullness, obscurity, and general
incomprehensibility; and I am afraid I shall not be
believed when I say that, properly treated, it may be
made intelligible, interesting, and even at times
amusing. Well, in those pages you will find the first
attempts of the national state to express its ideas in
writing ; and it must be admitted that the construction
is somewhat crude, the language bald, and the grammar
occasionally at fault — as you would expect from a
child. The ideas, too, are not new ; the laws are not
legislation in our sense of the word ; they simply
repeat what has hitherto been the custom ; they are
the committing to writing of those things which men
had practised as a matter of unconscious habit. Now
the child is generally given a governess ; so is the
State, and its governess is the Church. And the first
thing the governess says is ' you must be good.' Those
precise words do not occur in Stubbs's Charters, but
the meaning is conveyed in somewhat more formal
terms when a legatine council at York lays it down *
1 Rectitude regis noviter ordinati et in solium sublimati est haec tria
praecepta populo Christiano sibi subdito praecipere, etc. — Stubbs's Select
Charters, p. 62.
54 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
that the right and proper thing for a newly crowned
and consecrated king is to see that peace is kept in
Church and State, to prohibit wrong and violence, and
to ordain justice and mercy in all his judgments. This
is the function of the Church in the Dark and Middle
Ages, to educate these growing states in the proper
notions of right and wrong, to uphold a standard higher
than that of force and fraud, and to set the moral
above and before the material order of things. No
higher or more necessary duty has been fulfilled by
any institution ; although one may sometimes think
that the anathemas, interdicts, and excommunications
employed by the Church to terrorise medieval sove-
reigns were somewhat like the bogies used to frighten
little children. The Church, too, taught the State to
write ; clerk and cleric are one and the same word ;
the writer was a churchman, and churchmen did all
the writing in the early Middle Ages. They intro-
duced written laws into England and written wills.
They wrote all the history in those times, and perhaps
they coloured it too. And they derived a more mate-
rial advantage from the writing of wills ; for it com-
monly happened that wills written, proved, and
administered by clerical hands contained munificent
bequests to ecclesiastical foundations.
As time went on, however, the State began to
develop ideas of its own ; legislation begins to be
something more than the statement of ancient custom.
It begins to enunciate new principles, and the State to
enforce them. The State in fact has developed a will
of its own, and then the differences with the governess
THE NEW MONARCHY 55
begin. The first real act of legislation dates in
England from the reign of Henry II., and so does the
first great quarrel with the Church ; you find one in the
Assize, and the other in the Constitutions of Clarendon.
The result of this battle royal is still disputed : whether
the victory really lay with the State or the Church, the
child was not yet old enough to do without the gover-
ness ; and it remained in somewhat sulky tutelage, with
occasional rebellions, until the sixteenth century. Its
sovereignty was denied, and it spent its time, not so
much in governing, as in struggling for existence.
But by the sixteenth century the child had grown to
lusty youth, if not to manhood. The governess was
dismissed with what she thought a very inadequate
pension ; and we hear much of the great spoliation
made by Henry vin. The State now boldly claimed
omnipotence ; and the claim is most forcibly and
logically expressed in the Leviathan of Thomas
Hobbes — the best philosophical comment extant on
the Tudor system, although it was written in Stuart
times. Sovereignty, he explained, must be absolute,
though the sovereign need not be a monarch ; it may
be a popular assembly, and to-day it is Parliament.
It does not merely state law ; it does not merely apply
law ; but it creates law. Instead of being merely a
custom or a revelation of God or of nature, law has
become a command of the State. Bentham adopted
this view when he spoke about the * omnicompetence J
of the State ; and the position is not now seriously chal-
lenged. It may be unwise or unjust for the State to
do various things ; but if it does those things by proper
56 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
constitutional methods, their legal authority cannot
be denied, though their moral validity may be im-
pugned. Within the limits of human possibility, the
State has become omnipotent ; its growth is complete ;
from a creation it has become a creator.
This complex and abstract conception of the State
has only been evolved by a slow and painful process.
The Teutonic invaders of Great Britain had scarcely
any notion of the State ; their state was simply their
kindred, their blood relations. They knew of no such
thing as treason ; all crimes were merely offences
against the kindred, and might be redeemed by money
payments to the family. This family system broke
down under the stress of war and migration, which
produced a specialised military class ; and the chief
of this class became the king. The Church baptized
what war had begotten ; and the king became gradu-
ally the anointed of God, the fountain of honour and
justice, and lord first of the people and then of their
land. He symbolised the unity of his people, and his
authority grew in degree as it expanded in area. At
first he is merely a tribal chieftain ; next he is King of
the Mercians, the Northumbrians, or the West Saxons;
and finally King of the English. But the English are
still divided ; there are many dialects, myriad local
customs, and diverse methods of thought. The Saxon is
not as the Northumbrian ; and the antagonism between
North and South, which gave William the conquest of
England, is hardly extinct until the sixteenth century ;
the last forcible expression of it is the rebellion of the
Earls in 1569, which is as much the last kick of an
THE NEW MONARCHY 57
expiring feudalism as it is a protest against Protestan-
tism. The king is for long the only national represen-
tative, and round him centre such national aspirations
as emerge from the conflict of local passions. National
unity is only personal ; the king is the State ; treason
is an offence against him ; and it required a very
arbitrary straining of the law to bring it to bear against
Strafford with the idea that treason was really an
offence against the State, of which the king was only
an ornamental expression.
Feudalism, however, was an uncongenial soil for
absolute monarchy. The king was the theoretical
apex of civilisation, the head of everything; but
practice robbed him of most of his powers, and divided
them among his barons. The king was primus inter
pares y little more ; and all the talk about divine
right, absolute power, and passive obedience is modern
and not medieval. Indeed the growth of these
things is one of the factors of modern history, and
one of the chief features of the age with which we are
dealing. As is always the case, the growth is one of
events and ideas ; it is both material and moral, and
it is impossible to disentangle the action and reaction
of these two elements upon one another. One school of
historians, or rather philosophers, fondly imagines that
history is simply the working out of ideas, that political
philosophy has moulded events, that force has never
conquered truth, that right is might. According to
this school the New Monarchy is the material result
of the new ideas about kingship which spread in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Another school
58 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
holds that political philosophy is simply a series of
deductions from past experience, of comments on
facts already decided, that events have moulded ideas
more than ideas have moulded events, that force is
the ultimate sanction, that persecution has succeeded
whenever it has been steadily and skilfully applied,
that might is right. According to this school, the
new ideas about kingship were simply the reflexion
in men's minds of the material achievements of the
New Monarchy. Amid the conflict of these two
schools one thing is clear, and that is that generalisa-
tions are always to some extent untrue. No one
really acquainted with history can maintain that
persecution has never succeeded ; logically, too, it is
obvious that if right is always might, then might is
always right. If truth has always prevailed, then
whatever has prevailed is truth ; and we set the fatuous
generalisation ' whatever is, is true ' beside Alexander
Pope's still more childish assertion that ' whatever is,
is right.'
The correct sequence seems to be that material
necessities predisposed men's minds towards a modi-
fication of the existing system ; this was perceived by
the rulers and statesmen of that time, who applied the
practical remedy ; and then followed the theoretical
justification of the accomplished fact. Machiavelli
did not invent his Prince, he merely painted him from
life. Hobbes did not imagine the Leviathan ; he
merely reduced to a dogma the practice of Tudor
sovereigns ; and, as so often happens, the conditions,
which had produced and justified that practice, had
THE NEW MONARCHY 59
already passed away before the philosopher evolved
out of it an abstract theoretical system for universal
and permanent application. However that may be,
the old order in the fifteenth century was in a state
of liquidation, and the problem was how to keep
society afloat. Every great medieval institution had
gone or was going under. The empire had dissolved
into nations, the prestige of the Papacy had been
dimmed by its Babylonish captivity at Avignon and
then by the great schism. Unity gave way to diver-
sity of tongues, of churches, and of states ; and the
medieval cosmopolitan became the modern nation-
alist, patriot, separatist. Feudal chivalry and feudal
castles had fallen before gunpowder and artillery ;
the growth of industry and commerce had under-
mined a social system based on the tenure of land ;
and the middle classes had sapped the power of the
barons. The manorial system had broken down
through the substitution of rent for services and the
emancipation of the serfs. The revival of learning,
the invention of the printing press, the expansion
of the world by geographical discovery had removed
the ancient landmarks and delivered the minds of
men. There was a universal welter, a menace of
general anarchy. In France the strife of Burgundian
and Armagnac threatened political disintegration and
the destruction of social order. The Wars of the
Roses brought upon England a similar tale of
disasters. Everywhere there was need of a saviour of
society ; everywhere this saviour was found in the
king. * Le nouveau Messie} says Michelet, ' est le roi!
6o FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
National monarchy alone seemed to profit by the
decay of other established institutions ; it survived
the Middle Ages and gained by their disappearance,
because it was the embodiment of the coming force
of nationality. Kings had already reduced the
emperor, their nominal lord, to a shadow ; they now
made havoc with the power of their nominal sub-
ordinates, the feudal magnates ; and the struggle be-
tween the disruptive forces of feudalism and the
central authority ended at last in monarchical triumph.
Internal unity prepared the way for external ex-
pansion. France was first in the field. The misery
and humiliation of the Hundred Years' War produced
a nationalist reaction, an outburst of a new French
patriotism of which Jeanne D'Arc is the inspirer and
patron saint. The feud between Burgundian and
Armagnac was healed ; by the ordinances of Orleans
(1439) the foundations were laid of a national army
and a national system of finance. The cunning of
Louis XI. consolidated the work of Jeanne D'Arc. The
remnants of feudal independence were crushed, and
France began to expand at the cost of weaker states.
Parts of Burgundy, Provence, Anjou, and Brittany were
incorporated in the French monarchy ; and the exu-
berant strength of the new-formed nation burst the
barriers of the Alps, and overflowed into the plains of
Italy. Other States followed the example of France ;
Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile,
drove out the Moors from Andalusia, and founded the
modern kingdom of Spain. Marriage had been his
method ; but in the arts of successful matrimony none
THE NEW MONARCHY 61
could compete with the Hapsburgs. Bella get ant alii ;
tu^felix Austria, nube. Maximilian married the heiress
of Charles the Bold, and united the Netherlands with
Austria ; his son, the Archduke Philip, married the
heiress of Ferdinand of Aragon and of Isabella of
Castile ; and their two sons were the Emperors
Charles v. and Ferdinand I. The former made the
Spanish Empire ; the latter founded the Austro-
Hungarian monarchy by wedding the daughter of the
King of Hungary and Bohemia. This union, however,
was purely dynastic, not national ; and it was the doom
of Austria to be made by the marriage of princes and
marred by the discord of peoples.
The political system of Europe was thus roughly
sketched out, though the boundaries of the rival king-
doms were still undetermined, and there remained
minor principalities and powers, chiefly in Italy and
Germany, which offered an easy prey to their ambitious
neighbours. For both Germany and Italy had sacri-
ficed national unity to the shadow of universal sov-
ereignty, Germany in the temporal and Italy in the
spiritual sphere. The German king was also Holy
Roman Emperor, bound by his office to the hopeless
task of enforcing his authority in Italy, and Italy was
the tomb of German national unity. Its own unity
was prohibited by Papal ambition, for the Pope could
not tolerate a secular rival in the Italian Peninsula ;
and, from the days of the Goth and the Lombard in
the sixth and eighth centuries to those of Victor
Emmanuel in the nineteenth, every aspirant for the
national sovereignty of Italy has had to meet the bitter
62 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
enmity of the Papacy. And so both Italy and Germany
were ruled out of the national race, and had to wait
three hundred years for that national consolidation
which their rivals achieved in the sixteenth century.
This process of unification was not merely material
and geographical. When one country is united with
another it means not only a union of territory but an
attempted harmony of different aspirations, interests,
and politics. Look at the map of Spain, for instance.
1 The geography of Spain,' says a recent writer on
ancient history,1 * has always been the key to the
history and even to the character of the inhabitants.
Its peninsular form, and its singularly definite frontier
on the one side on which it is not surrounded by
the sea, give the country a superficial appearance
of unity. In reality it is broken up into separate
sections by a succession of transverse mountain ranges
which are cut by no great river running from north to
south. The dip of the country is from east to west,
and accordingly the chief rivers rise near the Medi-
terranean and flow into the Atlantic. " Nature," it has
been said by one who knew Spain well, " by thus
dislocating the country, seems to have suggested
localism and isolation to the inhabitants, who each in
their valleys and districts are walled off from their
neighbours." So is explained that powerlessness for
combination on a great scale which Strabo absurdly
ascribes to the moroseness of the Iberians, whereas
that distrustful temper was itself a mere result of the
geographical conditions. " They are bold in little
1 W. T. Arnold, Studies of Roman Imperialism, 1906.
THE NEW MONARCHY 63
adventures," says Strabo, " but never undertake any-
thing of magnitude, inasmuch as they have never
formed any extended power or confederacy. On this
account the Romans, having carried war into Iberia,
lost much time by reason of the number of different
sovereignties, having to conquer first one then another ;
in fact it occupied nearly two centuries or even
longer before they had subdued the whole." ' So, too,
when the Saracens conquered Spain they soon split up
into half-a-dozen little Moslem states, and it took the
Spaniards four centuries to subdue them, the Spaniards
themselves being divided up into nearly half-a-dozen
kingdoms. Nor has this separation entirely dis-
appeared ; Spaniards fought on different sides in the
War of the Spanish Succession. ' It is always
dangerous,' says a modern description,1 ' to enter into
conversation with a stranger in Spain, for there is
practically no subject upon which the various nation-
alities are unable to quarrel. A Frenchman is a
Frenchman all the world over, and politics may be
avoided by a graceful reference to the Patrie for which
Republican and Legitimist are alike prepared to die.
But a Spaniard may be an Aragonese or a Valencian,
an Andalusian or a Guipuzcoan, and patriotism is a
flower of purely local growth and colour.'
Each of the kingdoms, united in the fifteenth
century to form Spain, had its own individual aspira-
tions suggested by its peculiar geographical conditions.
Aragon, for instance, is cut off from the rest of Spain
by a series of mountain systems, and mountains are a
1 H. Seton Merriman, The Velvet Glove.
I
64 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
greater barrier than the sea. It was easier to create
the British Empire than to unite Germany with Italy
or France with Spain. Louis xiv. boasted that the
Pyrenees were no more, when he placed his grandson
on the Spanish throne ; but the Pyrenees exist, and
France and Spain are separate. Now Aragon looks
towards the sea, the Mediterranean ; its aspirations
He in that direction ; and its Mediterranean commerce
made its maritime province, Catalonia, the most pro-
gressive and the most prosperous part of Spain. There
alone did a middle class and a trading population
grow, and even to-day Barcelona is the headquarters
of revolutionary sentiment in Spain. Instead of ex-
panding across the mountains, it had first expanded
across the sea, and had successfully laid claim to Sicily
and Naples. These Mediterranean claims and ambi-
tions, involving conflicts with France, with the Turks,
and in Italy, were the contribution of Aragon to the
future projects and perplexities of Spain. The dower
of Castile comprised claims on Portugal and hopes of
Andalusia, an oceanic sea-board with its loop-holes to
the New World in Vigo, La Coruna and Ferrol, and
a northern outlook through Bilbao and Santander,
whence Spanish trade and Spanish ships sailed the
Bay of Biscay and the English Channel. Castile con-
tributed to the United Kingdom its medieval pride
and priesthood, its crusading zeal against the Moors
and Indians, and the spoils of Mexico and Peru. The
acquisition of Andalusia brought into the joint- st
Cadiz and Gibraltar, the command of the entrance t
the Mediterranean, and African ambitions which le
THE NEW MONARCHY 65
Charles v. to waste his strength in efforts to conquer
Tunis and Algiers. Union was not altogether
Strength ; for with strength it brought distraction
'between conflicting ambitions and heterogeneous
policies. Spain could never make up its mind on
which horse to place its money, the Mediterranean,
Africa, Europe, or the New World. Charles V. rang
the changes ; now here, now there, hesitating which
enterprise to take first, he could never completely
succeed because he could never entirely concen-
trate.
France was more successful because its unity was
more real. Unity in fact has been its passion under
all its forms of government, and mountain chains have
not secluded its people in close compartments. But
its origin was as composite and its elements as varied
as those of Spain. Aquitaine, which had not been
peopled by the Franks, did not become really French
until the seventeenth century ; and the root, which
Huguenotism struck in it, may have owed some of its
tenacity to racial bias and the traditions of provincial
independence. At any rate, before the rise of Cal-
vinism, the south-west of France was resenting the
Gabelle and regretting its lost connection with the
English Crown. But for the most part union brought
real strength to France ; and the conflict between the
policies, which her various acquisitions brought, was
not really ruinous until the eighteenth century, when,
during the Seven Years' War, she sacrificed her
: colonial future in pursuit of European glory. These
colonial prospects were the fruit of her union with
E
»
66 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Normandy and Brittany in the fifteenth century. The
Normans, wrote an English ambassador from Paris in
the reign of Elizabeth, will be rovers and pirates as
long as they live. They were rovers after the style of
Frobisher, Hawkins, and Drake ; and they brought
back to France her dominion in Canada and the West
Indies. The Newfoundland fisheries, developed by
Norman and Breton seamen, were the nursery of the
French marine, and they were one of the points for
which Louis xiv. fought hardest in the negotiations
for the Treaty of Utrecht. The acquisition of Nor-
mandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine gave France nearly
the whole of her sea-board on the Channel and the
Atlantic, and made her the naval and colonial rival of
England. But for these unconscious builders of em-
pire in the fifteenth century, there would have been
no French in Canada or in India ; and the history
of English expansion in the Eastern and Western
hemispheres would have been widely different.
As Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine gave
France her Atlantic position, so the acquisition of
Provence brought her into the Mediterranean. But
for that she would not be in Corsica, Algiers, and
Tunis to-day ; there would have been no battle of the
Nile, no Crimean War, no dual control in Egypt, no
Fashoda incident. The Corsican ogre would not have
been a Frenchman, and no one can fathom the differ-
ence which that fact alone would have made in nine-
teenth century history. The partition of Burgundy by
Louis XI. was also a seed-plot of future strife between
Valois and Hapsburg, though all the defeats of Francis I.
THE NEW MONARCHY 67
did not compel restitution. Lastly, it was the union
of Anjou and Orleans with the French Crown which
occasioned the French invasion of Italy, and perennial
strife therein between French, Spaniards and Austrians.
For, just as Aragon brought to the Spanish monarchy
its claims on Naples and Sicily, so Anjou brought the
competing Angevin claims to France; and the medieval
rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Aragon was
merged in a more comprehensive rivalry between
France and Spain. So, too, when Louis of Orleans
became Louis XII. of France, he endowed the French
Crown with the Visconti claim to Milan, and no apple
of discord produced more strife than that fertile but
ill-fated duchy.
All this expansion pointed to closer contact, friendly
or hostile ; isolated squatters on a limitless plain or
veldt have little communication ; but, as soon as they
have pegged out claims right up to their neighbours',
they see one another more often and watch one another
more closely. It was so with these national States.
Hitherto diplomatic relations had been rare and spas-
modic ; ambassadors were only despatched on special
occasions ; now they became regular and resident.
The necessity of watching one another's designs begat
the modern diplomatic system ; mutual adjustment of
each other's disputes produced international law — an
incomprehensible idea when all States were theoreti-
cally subject to one imperial suzerain ; l and mutual
1 e.g. In 1899 Great Britain declined arbitration with the Transvaal
on the ground that the Transvaal being subject to British suzerainty there
could be no international relations between them.
68 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
jealousy of each other's growth gave rise to the theory
of the balance of power.
The external development of the area, over which
the national monarch ruled, reacted upon the degree of
authority which he exercised within his dominions.
Every extension of his sway intensified his dignity and
power, and lifted him higher above his subjects. Local
liberties and feudal rights, which checked a Duke of
Brittany or King of Aragon, were powerless against a
King of France or a King of Spain. Meetings of the
Estates-General in France grew rarer until they ceased
altogether in 1614. In Spain the Cortes lost control
over taxation and administration, and even in England
it seems that the early Tudors, had they been so
minded, might have dispensed with Parliament. The
sphere of royal authority encroached upon all others ;
all functions and all powers tended to concentrate in
royal hands. The king was the emblem of national
unity, the centre of national aspirations, and the object
of national reverence. In France and Spain men had
many provincial parliaments, but they had only one
king.
This monarch gained as much from the growth of
the new ideas as he did from the decay of the old.
The Renaissance, the revived study of Roman Civil
Law, and the Reformation itself all contributed to the
growth of royal absolutism. There seems no direct
connection between the study of Greek and political
despotism ; but indirectly the passion for scholarship
took the zest out of politics. Moreover, scholars who
worked with their pens had to live on their pensions ;
THE NEW MONARCHY 69
and pensions are more easily got from princes than
from parliaments. Parliaments will vote huge sums
to successful generals, but never a penny to a great
scholar or sculptor, poet or painter ; for purely intellec-
tual achievements are not as yet regarded as services
to the State. And so the host of Renaissance scholars
looked to the king and were not disappointed ; every
New Monarch was in his way a new Maecenas, and had
his reward in the praise of the world of letters, which
found as little to say for parliaments as parliaments
found to give.
The Renaissance did a more direct service to the
New Monarchy. Men turned not only to the theology,
literature and art of the early Christian era ; they also
began to study anew its political organisation and its
system of law and jurisprudence. The code of
Justinian was as much a revelation as the original
Greek of the New Testament. Roman Imperial Law
seemed as superior to the barbarities of common law
and feudal custom, as classical did to medieval Latin.
England escaped with a comparatively mild attack of
Roman law, because she had early been inoculated
with it under Henry II. But the attack proved fatal
to maturer constitutions ; and Roman Civil Law sup-
planted indigenous systems in France and Germany,
in the Netherlands, Spain and Scotland. Notning
could have suited the kings of the New Monarchy
better; common law, canon law, and feudal custom
were all of them checks upon despotism. The Roman
Civil Law could be used against all ; quod prindpi
placuit legis habet vigorem ran the maxim of Ulpian,
70 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
a maxim which could be quoted against Popes as well
as against parliaments. Nor was this all ; Roman
emperors were habitually deified, and men in the
sixteenth century were almost inclined to pay similar
honours to their kings.
The Reformation itself encouraged this tendency of
the Renaissance ; and there is no greater error than to
think that that movement had anything to do with
political liberty. Protestantism, it is true, was origi-
nally an appeal to private judgment against authority,
but only in spiritual matters. Luther explained to
the rebellious peasants of Germany that the Gospel
message of freedom for all mankind was not an attack
on serfdom ; and even in the spiritual sphere the
Reformers soon fell into the error of the French
Revolutionists when they announced their intention of
compelling men to be free. All believed in fire as the
proper purge of heresy ; they only differed about the
heresy and about the rival rights of Church and State
to prescribe the fire. They claimed national inde-
pendence of Rome, but repudiated individual right to
dissent from the national Church or the national State.
For the State they asserted, if not infallibility, at any
rate divine institution and unlimited authority to
enforce its will. They proclaimed a right of resistance
to the Church and a duty of passive obedience to the
State. They reverted in fact to the political theory
of the primitive Church ; it was part of the Renais-
sance, the revival of the ancient, and repudiation of
the medieval. Now the primitive Church had a simple
political theory, which was not by any means original.
THE NEW MONARCHY 71
The writers of the New Testament and the Fathers of
the Church were born into the conditions of a despotic
system. They accepted it just as they accepted
slavery, not as good things in themselves but as a
divinely ordained remedy or punishment for the
original sin of man. The powers that be are ordained
of God, 'said St. Paul; and working on this basis,
some of the Fathers developed the theory that the
person and authority of the ruler were so sacred, that
resistance to him was equivalent to resistance to God
Himself. This was the idea borrowed by the Re-
formers. Cranmer told the rebels of 1 549 that, if the
whole world prayed for them until doomsday, it would
avail them nothing, unless they repented of their
disobedience to their king. The Reformers, like some
early Fathers, transferred the divine authority of the
State, whole and entire, to the particular ruler,
Circumstances required a saviour of society and the
Reformation consecrated him. 'The new Messiah is
the king/
Nowhere was the king more emphatically the saviour
of society than in England. The sixty years of
Lancastrian rule were in the seventeenth century
represented as the golden age of parliamentary
government, a sort of time before the fall to which
popular orators appealed against the Stuart despotism.
The Lancastrian kings were at the mercy of their
parliaments, and parliamen/ in the seventeenth century
wished to do the same by .he Stuarts ; that was their
idea of government. But to keen observers of the
time the chief characteristic of Lancastrian rule was
72 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
its 'lack of governance,' or administrative anarchy.
The limitations of parliament were never more striking
than when its power stood highest. Even in the
sphere of legislation, the Statute Book has seldom been
so barren. Its principal acts were to narrow the county
electorate to an oligarchy by restricting the franchise
to forty-shilling freeholders, excluding leaseholders
and copyholders altogether ; and to confine the choice
of electors to local men. It was not content with
legislative authority ; it interfered with the executive,
which it could hamper but could not control. It was
possessed with the inveterate fallacy that freedom and
strong government are things incompatible, that the
executive is the natural enemy of the legislature, that
if one is strong the other must be weak. It preferred
a weak executive, and strove to compel the king to
' live of his own,' when ' his own ' was absolutely
inadequate to meet the barest necessities of admini-
stration. It failed to realise that liberty without order
is licence ; that order must be established before
liberty can be enjoyed ; and that a strong government
is the only means of enforcing order. Parliament had
acquired power, but repudiated responsibility ; and the
connecting link between it and the Crown had yet to
be found in the Cabinet. Hence the Lancastrian
experiment ended in a generation of civil war, and the
memory of that anarchy explains much of the Tudor
despotism.
The problems of sixteenth-century history can only
be solved by realising the misrule of the previous
age, the failure of parliamentary government, and the
THE NEW MONARCHY 73
strength of the popular demand for a firm and master-
ful hand at the wheel. There is a modern myth that
Englishmen have always been fired with enthusiasm
for constitutional government and consumed with a
thirst for the vote. That is the result of ages of
parliamentary rule ; our thoughts are cast in the
mould of the age in which we live ; and the interpre-
tation of history, like that of the Scriptures, varies
from one generation to another. The political de-
velopment of the nineteenth century created a
parliamentary legend ; and civil and religious liberty
became the inseparable stage properties of the
Englishman. Whenever he came on the boards, he
was made to declaim about the rights of the subject
and the privileges of parliament. National character
was supposed to have been always the same, and it
was assumed that the desire for a voice in the
management of the nation's affairs has ever been the
mainspring of an Englishman's action. In reality
love of freedom has not always been, and may not
always remain, the predominant note in the English
mind. At times the English people have pursued
that ideal through battle and murder with grim
determination ; but on other occasions the popular
demand has been for a strong government irrespective
of its methods, and good government has been
preferred to self-government. Wars of expansion and
wars of defence have often cooled the love of liberty
and impaired the faith in parliaments.
So it was in sixteenth-century England. Parlia-
ment had been tried and found wanting. ' A plague
74 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
on both your Houses ' was the cry ; and both Houses
passed out of the range of popular imagination and
almost out of the sphere of independent political
action. Men were tired of politics ; they wanted
peace, peace to pursue new avenues of wealth, to study
new problems of literature, art, and religion.
They cared little for parliamentary principles, and
vastly preferred that the king should levy benevolences
from the rich, than that Parliament should impose
taxes on the poor. They did not feel the prick of
Morton's Fork nor the weight of Dudley's Mills, and
Magna Carta was buried in oblivion ; it is not even
mentioned in Shakespeare's King John. A well-
known actor-manager thought that Shakespeare had
made a mistake ; and, when he produced the play
a few years ago, he interpolated a tableau vivant
representing the signature of that famous document,
thus destroying the unity and real meaning of the
play. Shakespeare, of course, was faithfully repre-
senting the spirit of his age ; he appeals to the
gallery in the flamboyant patriotism of Philip the
Bastard : —
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when she first did help to wound herself.
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we will shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to herself do rest but true.
So he appeals to national prejudice against Rome in
John's denunciation of the Pope : —
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous,
THE NEW MONARCHY 75
To charge me to an answer as the Pope.
Tell him this tale ; and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more ; no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions.
But an appeal to Magna Carta would have left a Tudor
audience untouched. The men of that day needed no
charm against a monarch who embodied national
aspirations and voiced the national will. References to
the Charter are as rare in the debates of Parliament
as they are in the pages of Shakespeare. Not till the
Stuarts came was Magna Carta discovered ; and the
best-hated instruments of Stuart tyranny were popular
institutions under the Tudors. The Star-Chamber
itself was hampered by the number of suitors, who
flocked to a court where the king was judge, where
both the law's delays and counsel's fees were
moderate, and where justice was rarely denied merely
because it might happen to be illegal. England in the
sixteenth century put its trust in its princes far more
than it did in its Parliaments. It invested them with
attributes almost divine ; no one but a Tudor poet
would ever have thought of the ' Divinity that doth
hedge a king ' ; or have written : —
Not all the water in the rough, rude sea.
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
' Love for the King,' wrote a Venetian of Henry VIII.
in his early years, ' is universal with all who see him ;
for his Highness does not seem a person of this world,
76 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
but one decended from Heaven.' The new Messiah is
the king.
Such were the tendencies which the kings of the
New Monarchy crystallised into practical weapons of
absolute government. Royalty had become a caste
apart ; the upper slopes of the feudal pyramid had been
swept away in the Wars of the Roses, leaving the king
alone in his glory at the top of an unsurmountable preci-
pice. Marriages between peers and princesses had not
been rare in the Middle Ages, but they now become
almost unknown. Only four instances have occurred
since 1485, two of them in our own day. One only
took place in the sixteenth century, and the Duke of
Suffolk was thought worthy of death by some for his
presumption in marrying the sister of Henry VIII.
By 1509 there were only one duke and one marquis left
in all England. The few peers who remained of the
old stock were excluded from government, and the
New Monarchs chose their ministers from lawyers,
churchmen, and middle-class families. They could be
rewarded with bishoprics and judgeships, and required
no grants from the Royal estates ; while their occu-
pancy of office kept out territorial magnates who
abused it for their own private ends. Of the sixteen
regents nominated by Henry vin. in his will, not one
could boast a peerage of twelve years' standing. The
lawyers, too, were civilians, not canonists or common
lawyers ; that is to say, they were bred in the absolutist
maxims of imperial Rome, and looked to their prince
for their all. Ira Principis mors est. So thought
Wolsey and Norfolk and Warham. ' Had I but^erved
THE NEW MONARCHY 77
my God,' cried Wolsey, ' as I have served my King.'
That cry echoes throughout the Tudor age ; men paid to
the new Messiah the worship they owed to the old ;
they reaped their reward in riches and pomp and
power ; but they won no peace of mind. To them there
was nothing strange in the union of Church and State,
and in the supremacy of the king over both : for, while
they professed Christianity in various forms, the State
was their real religion, and the king was their Great
High Priest. They were consumed with the idea that
the State was the end and crown of human endeavour ;
it was their idol and their ideal. It inspired them, and
they became its slaves. This is the real tyranny of
Tudor times; individual life, liberty, and conscience
were as nothing compared with national interests.
Nationalism was young, presumptuous, and exigent;
its passion had no patience with the foes to its desires,
and its cruelty was only equalled by its vigour. The
New Monarchy was the emblem and the focus of these
forces ; it had a great and an indispensable part to play
in the making of modern England ; it was strong, un-
principled, and efficient. But its greatest achievement
was that its success made the repetition of such an
experiment superfluous for the future. Order is
Heaven's first law ; on earth it must always go before
liberty. England could not have done without the
Tudors and all their works ; for they gave us law and
order. They prepared the way of liberty ; and, now
to us who enjoy that liberty, their works and their
methods are hateful. We dream of revolutions made
with rose-water, and think that peace might have been
78 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
won by persuasion. It might, had it not been for
human nature. Walking would be much easier, if, as
the Irishman said, you could only wear your boots six
months before you put them on. And the Tudors
might have shut up the Tower, and turned its axes and
spears into pruning-hooks, had they only enjoyed the
fruits of the storm and strife of the last three centuries.
Moral and political principles are the slow and painful
achievement of ages : and you can no more judge the
New Monarchy by the standards of to-day, than you
can apply to the child the canons by which you
approve or condemn the adult. To use the same test
for the sixteenth and twentieth centuries is to imply
that man stands to-day where he did then, and to
ignore the progress of four hundred years.
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 79
IV
HENRY VIII. AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
IN our last lecture we endeavoured to examine some of
the causes which produced the phenomenon called the
New Monarchy, and to show how circumstances pre-
disposed men's minds to accept a despotism and called
that despotism into existence. It is essential to bear
these things in recollection when we come to deal with
Henry vill. and the Reformation in England ; for both
the man and the movement would have been impossible
in the forms they took without the New Monarchy.
Each in its way is a thorny subject, for both are
matters of heated controversy to this day, and it is well-
nigh impossible for one who feels deeply on theological
questions to speak in a reasonably judicial spirit of
Henry vill. On the other hand invective is as easy
in his case as hero-worship. His wives cling to him
more closely after death than they did during life, and
Bluebeard is his most familiar nickname. Froude, as
you know, was inclined to reverse the picture, and to
regard Henry as the victim of the other sex ; and even
Bishop Stubbs thought that the personal appearance of
Henry's queens, as represented in their portraits, while
it does not excuse, at least helps to explain the readi-
ness with which he discarded them. Perhaps their
8o FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
children, or rather lack of children, had more to do with
it than their looks. At any rate I do not propose to
deal in this place with the wives of Henry vili. ; their
importance has been vastly over-rated ; they may have
been figureheads of various parties and policies, but a
figurehead is not a very essential part of a vessel, We
are more concerned with the pilot and the way he
weathered the storm.
That may be too flattering a term to apply to Henry
VIII. He has often been painted a bold, bad man ;
but recently we have been told he was a 'flabby
coward.' Now it is well to have all points of view
represented; any one is at liberty to portray Henry
as a flabby coward or as a bloodthirsty villain. But I
think one condition should be observed : our picture
must be intelligible. Our account of Henry vili. must
be an answer to the problem presented by his reign,
and we must explain how it came about that he was
allowed to do the things he did. From a worldly point
of view he was perhaps the most successful of English
kings. He achieved nearly everything he tried to
achieve, and his work was no mere transient triumph.
It has lasted to this day and become part and parcel of
England as we know it. He broke the bonds of Rome ;
he subjected the Church to the State ; he destroyed the
Monasteries ; he completed the union between England
and Wales ; he defeated the French and the Scots ; he
developed the parliamentary system ; he extended and
reformed English dominion in Ireland ; he built up the
English navy ; he flouted both Empire and Papacy, and
crushed with comparative ease the only revolt which
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 81
Englishmen ventured to raise up against him. That
does not exhaust the astonishing catalogue of his deeds :
he had bills of attainder passed against half the English
dukes and half the English cardinals who lived in his
reign. Wolsey escaped the Tower by death on the
way thither, but More, Fisher and Cromwell were sent
to the block. He divorced two queens, he beheaded two
others. Parliament gave the force of law to his pro-
clamations, released him from his debts, and empowered
him to regulate the succession by will.
Most of these things, it is true, are less extraordinary
than they look at first sight. Only four cardinals and
four English dukes lived in his reign ; so that only
two were attainted and only one of each was actually
brought to the block ; and of these two Buckingham
fell a victim to his own folly and to Wolsey 's enmity
rather than to that of Henry vili. It was only within
limits prescribed by Parliament that Henry's pro-
clamations had the force of law ; and he was not
empowered to leave the Crown away from any one
whose title was undisputed ; he could not have left
it from Edward vi. The cancelling of his debts was
probably popular, because it meant that a burden,
which would otherwise have fallen on the shoulders
of the mass, was left on those of a few rich creditors,
who had themselves profited largely by Henry's
spoliation of the Church. Even in the matter of
wives Henry only beheaded two out of six ; and of
those two, one was certainly, and the other probably,
guilty. And the wife who survived him had already
survived two other husbands without leaving a stain
on her character.
M
82 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
These qualifications must be made, but after they
have been made there remains a remarkable sum ;
and the problem is to account for Henry's success,
especially if we regard him as a flabby coward or a
bloodthirsty tyrant whose deeds were hateful to his
generation. There is no objection to calling him all
these things, provided that you make them harmonise
with a rational explanation of this coward's or this
tyrant's astonishing success. But the more cowardly
or the more tyrannical you make him out to be, the
more difficult you make your own and your real task
of solving the problem of his reign, of explaining how
it was that Henry accomplished so much, and how it
was that his work lasted so long. Flabby cowards are
not as a rule successful revolutionists, and measures
which depend solely upon the tyranny of one man do
not become part of a nation's policy and of a people's
conscience. And it is not open to any self-respecting
student of history to fling these charges and to leave
unexplained the problems they create. Of course, if
your object is to dress up history to look and sell
like a shilling shocker, you may do it with some
impunity and some success ; but then you only appeal
to an audience which has never realised that history
is a problem, or in fact that it ever happened at all.
The events described in a shilling shocker never
happened, and therefore there is no necessity to ex-
plain them. The events recorded in history did take
place, and therefore we have to make them intelligible.
Personally, I do not think that much can be said
for Henry's moral character. I do not believe in the
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 83
portrait of him as a much-maligned hero labouring
for the good of his people ; the altruistic motive was,
it seems to me, entirely absent from his composition.
If he laboured, and he did, at the work of statesman-
ship and to make the nation strong, it was in order
that he might be great. If he was not maliciously
cruel to the mass of his subjects, it was because he
knew that they would not stand it. If he consulted
their prejudices and interests, as he did, it was because
he knew that his own position depended on popular
support ; he made too many enemies to be indifferent
to the goodwill of his people. To individuals he was
relentless, partly because pity was foreign to his nature,
and partly because he knew that he could afford to put
down the mighty, provided he spared the humble and
meek. Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos is the
mission attributed by Vergil to the Roman Empire :
it was the practice of Henry VIH. : in both cases it
was a profitable and not an unsound policy. Egotism
was the mainspring of his action, the basis of his
character, and the root of his vices ; and egotism is
a fault which princes can hardly and Tudors could
nowise avoid. When you worship a man like a god,
you are doing your best to make him a devil; and
some of the responsibility for Henry's egotism must
be laid at the door of his people, for they acquiesced in
his strong and unscrupulous rule in return for the
attention he paid to their material interests. They
thought him the only alternative to anarchy and a
renewal of civil war: and with all his vices, they
preferred Henry vm. His personal morality was not
84 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
worse than that of most princes, and the number of
his wives is no great argument against him ; indeed
the fact that he married them might almost be taken
as a sign of grace in a king. Charles II. only married
one wife, and he divorced none ; but that hardly places
his morals above those of Henry VIII.
Henry, of course, made no sort of appeal to the
ethical nature of men. He appealed to their patriotism ;
but, as Dr, Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge
of scoundrels, and its ethical value is sometimes
abused. This, however, was no bar to his popularity.
Charles n. was more popular than Cromwell, in spite
of his lack of patriotism. The truth is that nations
and parties are strongly tempted to condone the
private vices of their champions. Protestants hush up
the backslidings of Henry of Navarre and William III.,
and Catholics those of Mary Stuart and James II.;
and the peccadilloes of Henry vill. were viewed with
a lenient eye by people who welcomed the breach
with Rome, the suppression of clerical privilege, and
the conversion of monastic wealth to national or at
least to secular purposes. The fact is that Henry was
as much a demagogue as a despot ; he led his people
in the way they wanted to go ; he tempted them with
the baits they coveted most ; and he appealed to the
most cherished of national prejudices. He did not
tread on their toes ; he used Parliament, but he did
not seek to destroy it. He upheld Catholic doctrine
as a whole, because he saw that the mass of the people
were not prepared for theological change. But when,
towards the end of his reign, he saw that, in spite of
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 85
the Six Articles and other methods of coercion, re-
formed opinions were making way, he prepared himself
to make further alterations ; and the Protector Somerset
only carried out the changes which were being secretly
elaborated during the last few months of Henry's life.
All this may be described as utterly unscrupulous ;
and rightly so, because religion should be kept clean
from the compromise which dominates politics. High
and dry Tories have in recent years accepted the fact
of democracy though they opposed its advent; and
there is nothing disgraceful in their doing so. But to
accept a change of religion from the same motives
is unprincipled, and so was Henry's readiness to
accept a doctrinal reformation. It was what is called
Machiavellian, and indeed Henry vill. is Machiavelli's
Prince in action. Expediency was the test of every-
thing and not principle ; religion was to be subservient
to the interests of the State. Fair means and foul
might alike be employed if the end was the national
welfare. The common law, the Ten Commandments,
were all very well as a general rule, but the highest
law of all was the safety of the State — or the Church.
For the same maxims were employed in the service of
the Church ; it was almost a commonplace that faith
need not be kept with heretics, and that killing was no
murder when it served a political or an ecclesiastical
end. Nor was this only a maxim of the schools. The
fate of William the Silent, of Henry of Navarre, illus-
trates the practice ; and the bulls of excommunication
against Henry VIII. and Elizabeth were, among other
things, licences and exhortations to kill in the open or
86 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
in secret. Every one, except the victim, agreed that it
was better that one man should die than that the
nation should suffer.
Acts of Attainder are simply solemn and national
assertions of this doctrine. They illustrate another
Machiavellian maxim practised by the Tudors, namely,
that while the prince should reserve to himself the
privilege of mercy, he should devolve on others the
odium of rigour. An act of pardon or restitution, even
when passed by Parliament, was read only once in either
House, and then without amendment and as a matter
of course ; because it was regarded as especially a royal
act. But an Act of Attainder was to be regarded as an
Act of the Nation represented by Parliament : it went
through all the usual forms. That was the function
of Acts of Attainder. There is a ridiculous notion
prevalent that they were substituted for trial by jury
because it was easier to get an Act through Parliament
than to obtain a verdict from a jury. Nothing could
be more untrue ; it was simplicity itself to pack a jury ;
it was no easy matter to pack both Houses of Parlia-
ment. Moreover, many Acts of Attainder were passed
against men who had been already condemned by
juries. There are only two or three instances like that
of Thomas Cromwell, in which men were executed
without legal trial ; and the House of Lords, which
unanimously passed the Attainder against Cromwell,
would have quite as readily condemned him when
sitting as a court of his Peers. The motive of Acts
of Attainder was to make the whole nation as far as
possible the accomplice of the king in these acts of
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 87
severity. Elizabeth's anxiety to do this in the case
of Mary Stuart is notorious ; she insisted on shifting
the responsibility, and Parliament was ferociously eager
to assume it.
The treason laws themselves are merely expressions
of this idea, that the security of the State is the first of
all political objects, and that expediency may override
justice. Traitors are not condemned because they are
immoral, but because they are dangerous. Lady Jane
Grey was almost a saint, but her execution for treason
was strictly legal ; the same may be said of Sir
Thomas More, and of other victims of Henry vill.
' Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the
throne,' is not a hopelessly false caricature of that time;
but the sovereign should not be made the scape-goat
for all the nation's sins. In a democratic age history
tends to become a series of popular apologies. Grote
began it in England with his defence of the Athenian
people for the execution of Socrates. But the idea
that the people can do no wrong is as absurd as the
notion that the king can do no wrong. A people in a
passion is just as irrational as a prince in a passion,
and is capable of even greater crimes. Popular
passions were strong in the sixteenth century, and
the violent deeds of the Tudors were the practical
expressions of popular feeling. There is no evidence
of popular disgust at any of the executions of that
time, except perhaps that of Protector Somerset.
Mary's holocaust did indeed produce an impression ;
but that was because she abandoned Tudor maxims,
and sought victims among the people.
88 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
This popular acquiescence in Tudor methods is not
a pleasant retrospect ; but it must not be denied on
that account. The Tudors had no means of resisting
a determined nation. Henry Vlll.'s standing army
consisted of a few yeomen of the guard and gentle-
men-pensioners ; he had no secret police or organised
bureaucracy ; his only fortress of commanding strength
was the Tower of London, and Charles V.'s ambassador
thought that in 1534 it would be easier to drive him
from the throne than it had been Richard III. He
mistook the temper of the people; the Pilgrims of
Grace had little difficulty in overrunning England
north of the Trent in 1536. Had England south of
the Trent been of the same mind, Henry Vlll.'s govern-
ment would have succumbed without a blow. He was
saved by the voluntary efforts of the mass of his
subjects ; the Pilgrimage was not suppressed by pro-
fessional soldiers or foreign mercenaries, but by English
yeomen. There was only one occasion on which
England rose as one man against the government ;
that was when Northumberland tried to set aside the
Tudor dynasty, and then the national will prevailed
without one drop of blood being spilt. We are there-
fore forced to the conclusion that Henry vili. on the
whole represented the wishes of the majority of the
English people, or at least of the politically effective
portion of the people. That does not mean that
individual acts were popular ; the divorce of Catherine
of Aragon never was, nor was the execution of Sir
Thomas More. But these acts did not disgust the
people so far as to make them seek a change of
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 89
government. There was in fact no opposition pre-
pared to take office in Henry's place; no rival had
even a plausible claim to the throne. Charles V. had
thought at one time that the Princess Mary might be
substituted for her father ; but Englishmen were not
likely to prefer a half-Spanish queen, who would be
merely an agent for Charles, to the English king ;
and Charles himself soon abandoned the idea as
hopeless. The Papal system of jurisdiction had few
adherents in England, and Henry was very careful
about touching Catholic doctrine.
And so it came about that Henry survived papal
threats, imperial preparations, and domestic faction ;
and went on step by step adding to the royal auto-
cracy. The history of his reign is one of gradual
development, both of character and of policy. In his
early years he was a slave of Vanity Fair ; athletics
were his passion, and in the hunting field, the tennis
court, the tourney, and the ball-room, he was more
than a match for the best of his subjects. Serious
matters of statecraft were left to Wolsey, who was
king in everything but name, although from the
first Henry took a profound interest in the Navy, in
learning, and in theology. His book against Luther,
which was the work of his own brain, is a remarkable
performance for a king ; and Erasmus speaks, not only
of the zeal, but of the courtesy and good-temper, with
which Henry conducted the theological discussions
which were then the fashion at court. No previous
king had been so well educated ; he knew Latin,
French, Spanish, and some Greek he was a first-rate
90 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
performer on musical instruments ; and one at least of
his anthems is still occasionally sung in English
Cathedrals. As time wore on, the athletic mania wore
off; and Henry began to take an active interest in
administration ; this alone would in the end have been
fatal to Wolsey's position, for Henry had to be master
in whatever sphere he chose to shine.
Wolsey's policy had, moreover, been anything but a
success. One of the greatest of English diplomatists,
Wolsey was nevertheless bound to fail because he
fought against the strongest forces of his age. In this
respect he was like Metternich, another great diploma-
tist, who sought by diplomatic means to put back the
hands of Time. By peace and parsimony Henry vii.
had secured for England real wealth and a still greater
reputation for it. Wolsey, turbulent and ambitious,
used this wealth to foster England's and his own
influence on the continent. He was favoured by the
intense rivalry between Charles V. and Francis I. ; and
at the Conference of Calais in 1521 he figured as the
arbiter of Europe. This proud position was not
supported by adequate military strength ; it depended
on Wolsey's skill and on England's wealth, which
enabled her to act as the paymaster of Europe. But
by 1523 the balance at Henry's bank had disappeared ;
fresh taxation became necessary and recourse to
Parliament. The Commons proved refractory, and
granted inadequate supplies. Wolsey next tried loans
and benevolences ; many counties resisted, and
ominous words were used. It was obvious that the
nation would not find the means for Wolsey's spirited
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 91
foreign policy; and the Treaty of Cambrai in 1529,
which settled the affairs of Europe for the time, was
arranged without consulting Wolsey. His influence
which had gone up like a rocket, came down like the
stick. His diplomatic judgment also had been at
fault. England was not really the arbiter, but only the
makeweight, in the European balance ; her influence
depended on the maintenance of that balance. But in
1521 Wolsey put the weight in the wrong scale. The
result was that at Pavia in 1525 France was utterly
defeated, and Charles v. became almost dictator of
Europe. The feeble efforts of Wolsey to restore the
balance between 1526 and 1528 only confirmed the
verdict of Pavia. Wolsey's policy had failed at home
and abroad : it was time for a change of system.
Nor was this all : in the Parliament of 1515 ominous
complaints were brought against the exactions and
privileges of the Church. Most dangerous quarrels,
records the Clerk of Parliament, broke out between
the laity and the clergy ; and Wolsey in alarm urged
upon Henry the speedy dissolution of Parliament.
Hitherto, since Henry's accession, there had been a
meeting of Parliament on an average once a year:
now eight years passed before another was called.
Financial difficulties compelled the summons of that
of 1523, but from that year not another was called
till Wolsey's fall. Why this sudden abandonment of
Parliamentary sessions in 1515? In an address to an
early Parliament of the reign, Warham, who was Lord
Chancellor as well as Archbishop of Canterbury, had
insisted upon the necessity of frequently consulting
92 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Parliament. What had caused that necessity to dis-
appear? The anti-clerical proceedings of the Parlia-
ment of 1515 supply the answer. Wolsey dreaded an
attack on the Church: keen-sighted observers were
already muttering about its coming subversion. The
clergy, it was said in 1513, were so unpopular that a
London jury would convict a clerk, were he as innocent
as Abel. The Pope had been openly denounced ; heresy
was spreading, and in 1511 Henry's Latin Secretary
complained to Erasmus that the holocaust of heretics had
caused the price of wood to rise. Now Wolsey's position
and prospects were bound up with the maintenance of
the ecclesiastical and Papal system. His immense
authority as Cardinal and Legate was merely a Papal
agency ; it would disappear with the abolition of the
Papal jurisdiction. Parliament must therefore be kept
at arm's length lest it should attack the Church. And
so he sought for fourteen years to rule without Parlia-
ment and by means of clerical influence. Under his
regime the chief ministers were ecclesiastics, much to
the disgust of the secular nobility, who soon began to
cast about for means to ruin Wolsey and destroy the
political predominance of the Church. The failure of
Wolsey's policy delivered him into their hands in 1529.
Now all this was independent of the question of
divorce, to which the whole Reformation in England
has been most inaccurately ascribed. The divorce
was merely the occasion of a Reformation, which
would certainly have come without it. It is not
possible to believe that England would have remained
permanently within the Roman Catholic Communion
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 93
when every other country, in which Teutonic strains
were dominant, broke away. The importance of the
divorce lies in the fact that it alienated from the Papal
cause the monarchy, which might for a time have
postponed the rupture. Henry vill. was not omnipo-
tent ; no ruler can accomplish anything except with
the help of collaborating forces ; and he would never
have been able to repudiate the Roman jurisdiction,
had it not been for the popular dislike of clerical
privilege and Papal control. Henry was able to turn
the balance ; and it was the Pope's refusal to grant
him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which first
inclined Henry against the jurisdiction, which he had
defended with so much zeal against Luther.
The divorce, as we must call it (though the Pope
said there was no divorce, and Henry said there had
been no marriage), was itself the outcome of various
circumstances. Anne Boleyn was certainly not the only
or the principal one of them; for as early as 1514,
when Anne was only seven years old, there were
rumours at Rome that Henry intended seeking a
divorce from Catherine because she failed to produce
the requisite heir to the throne. That was the real
question. Henry vill. had no surviving brothers and
no legitimate sons. The succession of females to the
English throne was not recognised. The Lancastrian
title had been based upon the denial of this right ;
Henry vil.'s own mother had been excluded although
all his hereditary claim was derived through her.
Matilda was the only woman who had tried to seize
the English throne ; and no one desired a repetition of
94 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
that experiment. Apart from domestic disputes the
succession of women seemed to threaten national inde-
pendence. The succession of Isabella of Castile had
been followed by its union with Aragon : that of Anne
of Brittany by its incorporation with France : that of
Mary of Burgundy by its absorption in the Hapsburg
dominions. England did not wish to be absorbed by
any other State. She did not mind absorbing Scotland,
but that was a different matter. She wanted an
English king and Henry VIII. a legitimate heir. By
1525 it was certain that neither wish would be fulfilled
so long as he remained married to Catherine. He
thought at first of recognising his illegitimate son, the
Duke of Richmond, as his successor. Possibly it was
the appearance of Anne Boleyn which decided him to
prefer a divorce. There were precedents enough in his
immediate family circle : both the husbands of his
sister Mary had been divorced by Papal sanction, and
the same favour was accorded to his other sister
Margaret. Not so very long before, a king of Castile
had been licensed by the Pope to take a second wife,
on condition that if within a certain period he had no
issue he should return to the first ; and Clement vil.
himself was inclined to favour a similar solution of
Henry's problem. But he could not, and he would
not, grant the divorce. He was perfectly frank about
his reasons : the Church, i.e. himself and Rome, were,
as his secretary wrote to Campeggio, completely in the
power of Charles V., Catherine's nephew. The defeat
of Francis I. at Pavia had led to the establishment of
Spanish dominion in Italy: the sack of Rome in 1527
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 95
had emphasised that fact, and in 1529 the Pope made
his humble peace with Charles. That bargain was
almost a family compact ; the Pope's nephew was to
marry the Emperor's illegitimate daughter, and the
divorce proceedings in England were to be quashed.
Thus was the breach provoked, and the Reformation
begun. Henry appealed from the Pope to Parliament ;
and a working alliance was formed between King
and Parliament against Pope and Church. Parliament
wanted the restriction of clerical privilege, powers, and
jurisdiction ; Henry wanted the abolition of Papal
control and of the legislative independence of the
Church. The first thing was to fill the government
with laymen instead of ecclesiastics. Wolsey fell as a
matter of course : the offices of Lord Chancellor, Lord
Privy Seal, and Secretary were transferred to laymen,
who since 1529 have, with the exception of Mary's
reign, always governed England. Then, one after
another of the outworks of the Papal system fell,
First-fruits and Tenths, Appellate jurisdiction, power
of appointing bishops, and so forth. Now it might
have been supposed that this destruction of the Papal
domination would have liberated the English Church.
But nothing was further from the mind of ' the majestic
lord who broke the bonds of Rome ' ; and every step
in the annihilation of Papal control was accompanied
by another towards the establishment of royal con-
trol. First-fruits and Tenths were not abolished : they
were transferred from Pope to King, and so was
the power of appointing bishops, for the pretence of
election cannot be regarded as anything more than
96 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
a solemn farce ; episcopal chapters were granted
licence to elect, but they were liable to praemunire
if they did not elect the king's nominee: and no
chapter yet has braved that penalty. The Church did
not become autonomous ; supremacy was simply taken
from the Pope and given to the King.
This truth is wormwood and gall to many of us
to-day with our belief in religious freedom: and
criticism of the Reformation is directed not so much
at what was done, as the way in which it was done.
The Church in England, it is said, should have been
liberated from Rome and then left to work out her
own salvation. That was not a solution which occurred
to any one then, and it was not practical politics. The
strife was not between the Church of England and the
Church of Rome, but between the universal Church and
national State, as it had been throughout the Middle
Ages. These were the only two recognised authorities,
the only powers capable of carrying out the Refor-
mation. All ecclesiastical powers were in theory
derived from the Papacy : the archbishop exercised
jurisdiction, but only as legatus natus of the Pope :
Wolsey tried to reform some monasteries, but only as
Papal legate : they were agents of the Pope, and an
agent is bound by his master's will. When they
act against it, they are acting ultra vires. Now the
Papacy had refused to reform : General Councils had
tried in the fifteenth century and had failed. The
work was left to the national State, which could act on
its own authority. Hence Parliament, and not Con-
vocation, is the instrument of reform : the measures of
the Reformation are not canon laws, but Parliamentary
i
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 97
statutes : the Book of Common Prayer itself is legally
a schedule of an Act of Parliament. It cannot be
altered by Convocation, it can by the Houses of Parlia-
ment. The Reformation in its external and constitu-
tional aspect is simply the last and greatest conquest
of the State, the assertion of its authority over the
Church, and of its absolute, undisputed supremacy
within the national frontiers.
The result was to nationalise the Church, to transform
it from the Church in England into the Church of
England, to make its services, ritual, and articles of
faith national rather than catholic. The breach once
accomplished with Rome, differentiation set in by a
law of nature. The Bible was made English ; an
English Litany was compiled, then an English Order
of Communion, and then an English Book of Common
Prayer, enforced by an English Act of Uniformity.
Finally an English definition of the faith in the shape
of the Thirty-Nine Articles was evolved. All these
things were intensely national, for the spirit which
produced them was that of national revolt. The same
spirit had something to do with the dissolution of
the monasteries : they were the least national of all
ecclesiastical institutions: everything about them was
cosmopolitan, and they were regarded as the most
obstinate papal strongholds. It was difficult to
harmonise them with a national system, and so they
disappeared. There were of course other and more
material reasons. Their wealth was an irresistible
temptation to Henry vill., and it provided him with
an irresistible lever. Monastic spoils were held out
G
98 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
as a bait to Henry's nobles, landed gentry, and com-
mercial magnates to confirm their zeal and faith in
Reformation principles. It was understood during
the Reformation Parliament that monastic lands
should be the reward for their support against Rome.
But even greed was not the ultimate cause of the
dissolution. It is probable that kings and nobles
were greedy for land in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, but they did not dare to attack the monas-
teries. The real cause was that monastic life had lost
its savour. Testimony to this fact is not confined to
the famous ' Black Book ' compiled by Cromwell's
visitors, which disappeared in Mary's reign. A
commission of cardinals appointed by Paul III.
acknowledged the existence of widespread abuses,
and every country in Europe found it necessary to
adopt sweeping measures of monastic confiscation.
France, Austria, and even Spain followed the example
of Henry vm. in the eighteenth century, when England
had already outstripped them in the race for national
greatness. And over and above these comparatively
sordid motives a few had come to believe that it was
nobler to stay in the world to save the world, than to
go out of the world to save one's own soul.
All this turned to the profit of national monarchy,
and Henry vm. boasted that as far as England was
concerned, he was King, Emperor, and Pope all
rolled into one. * Imperial ' was one of his favourite
adjectives: he named a ship the Henry Imperial ; his
crown, he said, was an imperial crown, and England
an imperial realm. Parliament and Convocation took
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 99
up the strain : they meant that England had not
emancipated itself from the Pope to throw itself into
the arms of that other medieval monarchy, the Empire;
and they zealously propagated a legend that Con-
stantine the Great had really granted England imperial
independence, while his alleged donation to the Papacy
was forged. The legislative and jurisdictional authority
of the Pope had been transferred to the King : but it
was not true to say that Henry vill. was Pope in
England. His power was a potestas jurisdictionis ,
not a potestas ordinis : he did not claim the spiritual
functions of the Pope, or even those of a bishop or a
priest. The administration of the Sacrament, baptiz-
ing, confirming, marrying, and burying were all left
to the clergy : and ' Supreme Head of the Church '
was an offensive phrase, which conveyed to many
more than Henry thought of claiming. The title
1 Supreme Governor,' which Elizabeth preferred, in-
cluded everything that Henry wanted. He claimed
control of the machine, but he did not pretend to
supply the motive power. He insisted upon selecting
the channels through which spiritual blessings flowed,
but he did not imagine that he was the channel, nor
the source from which they flowed. He was willing,
to use his own words, to leave to the clergy control
of men's souls, provided the State had control of their
bodies.
But within the sphere of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
and legislation he was supreme. The papal power
had in these matters been absolute ; every sort of
check had been repudiated ; the papal will was law ;
\
ioo FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
habet omnia jura in scrinio suo, as Clement vii. said of
himself. This had all been transferred to Henry VIIL,
with the somewhat bizarre result that he was at one
and the same time an absolute monarch in the Church
and a constitutional monarch in the State. He could
reform the Church by injunctions, when he could not
reform the State by proclamations. He could in
person condemn for heresy, when he could not for
murder or treason. This ambiguous position led to
some confusion in the Stuart times. Those monarchs
arrogated the same absolutism in the State that they
legally possessed in the Church ; and the dispensing
and suspending powers, which they constitutionally
exercised in the ecclesiastical sphere, they extended
to the temporal sphere. On the other hand, Parlia-
ment sought to apply the constitutional limits which
bounded the royal authority in the State to the royal
authority in the Church ; and there you have one of
the underlying sources of antagonism between King
and Parliament in the seventeenth century — an an-
tagonism which is more ecclesiastical than political,
and arose inevitably from the fact that the Tudor
settlement of religion was a compromise tenable only
so long as the Tudor dictatorship remained in force.
The supremacy over the Church was in fact a royal
and not a Parliamentary supremacy. Elizabeth quar-
relled with every one of her Parliaments on this
question. The sovereign was, in her opinion, supreme
over both spheres, ecclesiastical and temporal ; but
Parliament had only to do with the temporal sphere :
Convocation was co-ordinate with, and not subordinate
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 101
to it. In this she was more ecclesiastically minded
than Henry VIII. ; or perhaps it would be truer to
say that she dreaded Parliament more. She had
little to fear from Convocation ; and she supported it,
not because she loved it more, but because she loved
Parliament less. This was the germ of the Stuart
policy: Parliament was the aggressor, it threatened
both King and Church, and both formed a defensive
alliance against it. The victory of the State over the
Church in Henry's reign had been a personal victory
for the King ; but Parliament soon claimed to be a
better representative of the State than the King. It
wanted to control all the royal prerogative ; it suc-
ceeded so far as temporal matters were concerned, but
was not so successful in the ecclesiastical sphere. The
royal supremacy fell into abeyance between Parliament
and the Church : and the result has been ecclesiastical
anarchy from which an escape has not yet been found.
There is one other remark to be made about the
method by which the Reformation was established in
England. It was the work of a government and not
of a prophet. There was no Luther or Calvin in
England, because the strong monarchy did not favour
individual enterprise as did the political anarchy of
Germany and Switzerland. The result was perhaps
less truth, but greater order. To Luther or Calvin
truth could be the first and almost the only considera-
tion. A government has to consider not merely what
is truth, but whether truth can be translated into
action and imposed on a people. This restrained
the exuberance of theological debate, and England
102 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
came through the Reformation without a religious
civil war. It also came without a clear-cut system of
theology; the formularies of the English Church are
composite in origin and represent the working of
various minds : they are like the policy of a cabinet,
full of compromise, not entirely satisfactory to any
one, but tolerable to many. A government always
tries to strike an average ; the Tudors did so in the
Church of England ; but an average is anathema to
all extremes.
From this it follows that the Church of England has
never been really Lutheran, Zwinglian, or Calvinistic.
After the first breach with Rome there was a natural
tendency towards Lutheranism ; Cranmer passed
through a Lutheran phase, and between 1536 and
1538 an attempt at accommodation between the
Lutheran and Anglican churches was made. But
Henry himself categorically refused to concede the
three demands made by Lutheran envoys to England,
and the Six Articles reaffirmed England's allegiance
to Catholicism. Political changes in 1540 made an
alliance with the Lutheran princes unnecessary :
Cromwell fell, and Anne of Cleves was divorced.
The Catholic reaction was only temporary, but the
next wave of Protestantism was Zwinglian rather
than Lutheran ; and Henry Bullinger, Zwingli's suc-
cessor at Zurich, was the oracle of the advanced
reformers in the reign of Edward VI. The Calvinistic
phase, although it is often antedated, came later, not
till Elizabeth's reign when the Marian exiles had
returned from Geneva. Its success in Scotland made
HENRY VIII. AND THE REFORMATION 103
it more formidable than Lutheranism or Zwinglianism
had ever been, and in the seventeenth century it
seemed that the Church might become Calvinistic.
But by that time the Anglican system had taken
root and fortified itself in the national affection. The
Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican theology of
Hooker and the Caroline divines, were antidotes
against Puritanism ; and later on the development
of the secular and latitudinarian spirit produced an
atmosphere uncongenial to the severity of Calvinism.
Wycliffe, indeed, is more representative of English
theology than any foreign divine ; he anticipated
practically all the Protestantism that the English
Church adopted in the sixteenth century. Possibly
he anticipated more ; he was not a bishop, and he
did not breathe a spirit of compromise. He was per-
haps more of a Puritan than an Anglican ; and he
pointed to heights or depths to which the Established
Church never rose or fell. But the path which he
illumined was the path which England took, however
much she may have stumbled on the way and however
far she may have stopped short of his ideal ; and the
Morning Star of the Reformation in England was also
its guiding light.
104 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
V
PARLIAMENT
THE circumstances of which we have been speaking
in connection with the New Monarchy were anything
but favourable to the development of Parliamentary
independence and prestige. Indeed, everywhere but
in England Parliamentary institutions almost disap-
peared. The States-General met for the last time in
France before the revolution in 1614 ; the Cortes of the
Spanish Peninsula grew insignificant. In Germany
the Imperial Diet and the provincial assemblies
lost much of their influence, and ceased to control the
territorial princes. The same tendencies threatened
the future of the Houses of Lords and Commons.
Parliament in the sixteenth century seemed to meet
only to register the monarch's decrees and to clothe
with a legal cloak the naked despotism of his acts.
It is commonly asserted that they were packed with
royal nominees and dragooned by royal commands.
How far this picture is true we must now inquire.
Of the weakness of Parliament at the end of the
fifteenth century there can be no manner of doubt.
That was the natural result of the failure of Parliament
under the Lancastrians to secure respect for law and
order ; and this general effect was supplemented by
particular causes. The House of Lords was enfeebled
PARLIAMENT 105
through the slaughter of nobles on the battlefields of
the Wars of the Roses, and through their proscription
by the victor in times of peace. The process of
attainder not merely disposed of the individual peer,
but debarred his descendants from office and honour.
So the old lines died out : new creations were rare, and
the creatures were subservient. It was not till the
reign of Charles I. that the peers began to show any
signs of independence ; and then they were goaded
into opposition, not by public wrongs, but by personal
jealousy of the upstart Duke of Buckingham. The
spiritual lords were somnolent, and the lassitude of the
Church was the prelude to its fall. The reason was
that it had linked its fortunes with those of the
nobility : bishops and abbots were generally younger
sons of peers upon whom they depended for political
support ; and when the secular peerage committed
political suicide in the Wars of the Roses, the spiritual
peers were left powerless before the throne.
The House of Commons was never quite so destitute
of spirit, though it reached low-water mark in the later
years of Henry VII. Various acts of its own contri-
buted to its decline. By an Act of 1430 the county
franchise had been limited to the forty-shilling free-
holders, and forty shillings in those days was equiva-
lent to at least forty pounds to-day ; as the leaseholders
and copyholders were excluded from the vote, it is
clear that the county electors were reduced to a narrow
oligarchy, and their representatives could speak for
a small fraction only of the nation. In the boroughs
there was every variety of qualification for the fran-
106 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
chise ; but the general tendency in the fifteenth century
was to restrict it to the governing body of the borough,
and to make that governing body less and less depen-
dent on the populace. Another Act of the Lancastrian
period had made residence a condition for election, so
that only local men could be chosen. These local men,
like their constituencies, had only a local conscious-
ness ; they were not really interested in national
affairs, and they resented being called away from their
homes and their businesses to attend at Westminster to
matters with which they honestly felt incompetent to
deal. They tried to comfort themselves with their
wages, and to make something out of their necessities
by executing commissions in London for their local
friends. Neither proved very satisfactory ; a member
of the Reformation Parliament complained that his
residence in London cost him far more than his wages,
and the King was pestered with petitions from
members for licence to go home before the session
ended. As late as Elizabeth's reign the Lord
Chancellor apologised to Parliament for its summons as
being a necessary evil. Violent methods had some-
times to be employed to bring members up to West-
minster ; and I have already mentioned the instance in
which the two elected members for Oxfordshire fled the
country to escape the burden. There were instances in
which the Recorder of a borough was bound, as part of
his duties, to represent the borough in Parliament.
The constituencies, too, felt Parliamentary represent-
ation to be a burden rather than a privilege, and many
suffered it to lapse. They objected to finding wages
PARLIAMENT 107
for their members, and in 1539 a friend of Cromwell's
induced one or more constituencies to return his
nominees by guaranteeing that they should get their
representation done for nothing. This frame of mind
rendered it easy for county magnates to secure seats
for their friends. An aspiring politician in Elizabeth's
reign writes to the Earl of Rutland saying that he
desires for his learning's sake to be a member of
Parliament, and asking if the Earl has a seat to spare.
The Duke of Norfolk could return ten members in
Sussex alone. The Bishop of Winchester was in the
habit of nominating various burgesses in his bishopric.
These were abuses consequent on the lack of patri- .
otism and national consciousness on the part of the
constituencies. When Henry vin. sent a peremptory
order to a certain knight to represent Cumberland in
Parliament, it was not because he wanted to pack
Parliament, but because nothing short of a royal
command addressed to an individual could produce a
representative at all from so distant a constituency ; the
gentlemen of that district found Border raids far more
exciting than Parliamentary oratory. Parliamentary
representation was an irksome duty ; men could no
more resign a seat in Parliament than they can to-day
resign their obligation to serve on juries or pay
rates and taxes. That prohibition remains in form to-
day, though the spirit has departed. You have all
heard of the Chiltern Hundreds, for which M.P.'s
apply when they want to resign their seats ; the point
is that that stewardship is an office of profit under the
Crown, the acceptance of which by an Act of William
io8 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
ill. vacates a member's seat ; and it is only by this
cumbersome, roundabout method that a member can
divest himself of his Parliamentary duties. He cannot
resign in a straightforward way. The same incapacity
to resign then applied to ministers of state, and the
fact must be borne in mind when criticising those Tudor
officials who held office successively amid all the
changes of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and
Elizabeth. Resignation was regarded as an almost
cowardly dereliction of duty to the State ; a member
could not in fact resign, unless the King gave him
leave ; and again the form has remained to this day.
The King must accept a resignation before it can be-
come effectual ; if he refused, the minister would have
to remain in office. Practically he never does refuse
now, but he often did so in the sixteenth century.
Such were the Parliamentary conditions when the
Tudors ascended the throne : a great deal of Parlia-
mentary lassitude, and indifference to Parliamentary
questions on the part of the nation at large, a marked
tendency on the part of many constituencies to let
slide their Parliamentary representation, both on
account of the expense and because they thought that
the monarchy would look after their interests as
carefully and as effectively as their members ; and an
extreme reluctance on the part of possible candidates
to undertake the irksome burden of Parliamentary
duties. A realisation of these conditions will, I think,
tend to modify our view of the action of the Tudors
with regard to Parliament. We hear so much of
the despotism of the Tudors and the tyranny of Henry
PARLIAMENT 109
VIII., and we apply the same phrases so constantly to
the government of the Stuarts, that almost insensibly
we are led to conceive of the two kinds of rule as being
the same in character, and to attribute to the Tudors
the same antipathy to Parliament, the same desire to
dispense with it, that we find in all the Stuarts. That
Parliament survived in the sixteenth century we think
must have been in spite of, and not because of, the
Tudors ; and, considering the circumstances of the
time, we are somewhat at a loss to explain how it was
that Parliament survived at all. In fact Parliament
was in abeyance for considerable periods, for instance
during the latter years of Henry Vll.'s reign and
during Wolsey's domination ; and had the Tudors as
a whole been as averse to Parliament as those two
statesmen, it almost seems as though the Parliamentary
system might have suffered serious, and perhaps
irreparable, damage. But we shall find that Henry
vin. especially was anything but hostile to his Parlia-
ments ; that under him the Parliamentary system is
extended and developed ; that Parliamentary privileges
are asserted and maintained ; and that Parliament is
educated up to a national sense of duty. Parliament
in fact owes much more to the Tudor monarchy than a
democratic age is willing to admit ; it was not so
exclusively its own creation as parliamentarians would
believe. Now we must not believe that this develop-
ment of Parliament was due to any desire on Henry's
part to limit the royal prerogative or to any royal
belief in popular self-government. Tf -.^» due to his
desire to be great himself, and to his perception of the
i io FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
facts that a king at issue with his people can never be
really great or strong, and that a house divided against
itself cannot stand ; he sought to make Parliament not
the rival, still less the master, but the foundation, of the
royal authority.
In the clearness with which he perceived this Henry
vili. stands alone among the Tudors. Part of the
credit may be due to Thomas Cromwell, but not all ;
for Thomas Cromwell would have gone farther in the
direction of destroying Parliament than ever Henry
dreamt of doing. The adoption of this policy may
also have been due in part to Henry's realisation of
the extent to which his wishes and those of Parliament
coincided. He might have been as little sympathetic
to Parliament as Elizabeth was, had he discovered
the same antagonism in it and the same desire to
dictate to the Crown. However that may be, there
was considerable variation in the Tudor attitude
towards Parliament ; and it is necessary to be a little
careful in our dates, or we shall fall into one of those
generalisations which Bishop Stubbs says are ip so facto
false. A royal parvenu like Henry VII. felt at first
the need of Parliamentary countenance and support ;
he represented, moreover, the Lancastrian cause; his
ministers, and especially Cardinal Morton, were imbued
with the Lancastrian tradition, and the Lancastrians
had always depended upon Parliament. Consequently,
during the first few years of Henry Vll.'s reign
Parliaments are frequent; no fewer than five were
summoned between 1485 and 1497. But before the end
of the century Henry had established himself firmly
PARLIAMENT in
on the throne ; he had been recognised by Europe ;
all the serious pretenders had been removed ; there
remained, it was said, not a drop of doubtful royal
blood in England. Then Cardinal Morton died ; and
between 1497 and the end of Henry's reign only a
single Parliament ( 1 504) was called. It was the longest
interval (1497-1504) between one Parliament and an-
other since Parliament had existed, and was perhaps
the most critical period in its history.
The death of Henry vn. seems, however, to have
revived the Lancastrian tradition. Henry VIII., who
was not eighteen at his accession, left the government
to ministers like Archbishop Warham and Bishop Foxe,
who had been trained in Morton's school. Warham
in his opening address as Lord Chancellor to the
Parliament of 1511 dilated on the necessity of frequent
Parliamentary sessions, and between 1509 and 1515
there were six different sessions — an average of one a
year. But in the last two of these sessions the House
of Commons began to voice popular opinion against
the Church ; an act was passed limiting the benefit of
clergy, and petitions were presented complaining of
clerical exactions. Convocation replied by attacking
the House of Commons ; ecclesiastics cried out that
the Church was in danger. A Cardinal now controlled
the government of Henry VIII. ; in alarm he urged
upon the King the speedy dissolution of Parliament,
and for fourteen years he tried to govern without one.
His ecclesiastical despotism may be compared with the
eleven years' tyranny of Charles I. ; in both cases the
absence of Parliamentary grants led the government to
ii2 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
adopt arbitrary expedients — loans and benevolences by
Wolsey, ship-money by Charles I. ; and in both cases,
in Pym's words, he who went about to break Par-
liament was himself broken by Parliament.
The summons of the Reformation Parliament in 1529
was the natural accompaniment of the fall of Wolsey.
Before it met, every intelligent observer knew what its
programme was going to be : churchmen like Wolsey
and Campeggio called it the utter ruin and subversion
of the Papacy and Church in England. Ecclesiastics
were to be eliminated from the government ; clerical
privileges were to be restrained and clerical property
to be reduced ; papal jurisdiction was to be repudiated
and papal taxation to be removed. On this platform
King and Parliament were agreed; and from 1529 to
Henry's death in 1547 rarely a year passed without a
Parliamentary session. The Reformation Parliament
sat from 1529 to 1536; within a few weeks of its dis-
solution another was summoned in June 1536. A
fresh general election took place in 1539, and the only
year between then and Henry's death in which Par-
liament did not meet was in 1541. During the eighteen
years which elapsed, from the time when Henry took
the government into his own hands until his death,
there were only three in which Parliament did not sit.
This example was followed by Henry's immediate suc-
cessors ; there were five sessions of Parliament in the
six years of Edward's reign, and five in the five years of
Mary. Elizabeth was not so regular with her Parlia-
ments ; her marriage and religion were sources of peren-
nial dispute between her and her subjects. The alliance
PARLIAMENT 113
between the King and Parliament against the Church
had been transformed into one of Queen and Church
against Parliament ; and there were only thirteen
sessions during Elizabeth's reign of forty-five years.
She discourages rather than encourages Parliamentary
liberties, and she was far more arbitrary than her father
had been in her treatment of members. There is no
precedent in Henry VIIL'S reign for Elizabeth's denial
of freedom of speech and imprisonment of Wentworth ;
her regime is a half-way house between Henry vin.
and Charles I. ; and it was Henry vill. who accus-
tomed the nation to that idea of Parliamentary
participation in government which proved a fatal
stumbling-block to Charles.
It may seem paradoxical to represent Henry vill.
as less tyrannical than Elizabeth ; but he certainly
humoured his Parliaments more ; and, indeed, in other
respects it is not easy to justify the discrimination
usually made between the two monarchs in favour of
the Queen. She was certainly not more truthful than
her father ; she was by nature quite as callous ; and in
policy as devoid of scruple. Her suppression of the
Rebellion of the Earls in 1569 was as sanguinary as
Henry's suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace. There
was as much justification for the execution of Fisher
and Sir Thomas More as for that of Father Campion.
Elizabeth treated Lady Catherine Grey as harshly as
Henry treated Catherine of Aragon ; and the fate of
Secretary Davison was scarcely more fortunate than
that of Thomas Cromwell, though Davison had given
far less cause for offence. There were fewer executions,
H
ii4 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
but there was also less necessity ; for Henry vm. had
shown once for all that no miracles would happen to
protect the heads of disaffected churchmen ; Cardinal
Allen escaped the fate of Cardinal Fisher by keeping
at a prudent distance ...and the only rival claimant to
the throne was put to death. The title * good ' when
applied to Queen Bess has no more moral meaning
than the phrase a 'good' actor. It means that she
was good for the purpose then required ; she was
an adept in political sharp practice, and the incar-
nation of national prejudice. But she did not under-
stand Parliament as Henry vm. did. She took to
scolding it, and on one occasion through the mouth of
her chancellor she denounced members as ' audacious,
arrogant and presumptuous,' and upbraided them for
1 meddling with matters neither pertaining to them, nor
within the capacity of their understanding.' In the
latter years of her reign there is little to choose between
her relations with Parliament and James l.'s, except
that she could yield on occasion with grace, while
James could not ; and on its side Parliament, as it told
James I., forbore much in consideration of the Queen's
age and sex : it did not feel quite equal to the taming
of the shrew.
There is not, however, much difference of opinion
about the relations between Elizabeth and her Parlia-
ment. The crux of the question occurs in the latter
half of the reign of Henry vm. ; and the common
view seems to place insuperable obstacles in the way of
a rational explanation of the history of that epoch.
The usual assumption is that not only the Church but
PARLIAMEN. 115
the nation as a whole was opposed to Henry's policy,
and that the people only assented to it through Parlia-
ment because Parliamentary elections were controlled
by the Crown ; because members were royal nominees ;
because freedom of speech was suppressed inside as
well as outside the two Houses ; and because Parliament
itself had no option but to register in servile submission
the royal decrees. Now if this were all true, it would
leave unsolved the riddle how Henry VIII. was able to
impose his will on the nation in the face of opposition
from every quarter. Some people seem to imagine
that when you have said he was an absolute despot, you
have explained everything : you have, as a matter of
fact, explained nothing : absolutism is not a mathe-
matical quantity which you can call into existence
by assuming it. The question is how he came to be
absolute, if he was absolute, which he was not ; and the
only answer given is some loose and ill-informed talk
about the servility of the people and the servility
of Parliament. Now the English people are not by
nature servile ; nor were they in the sixteenth century.
If you reckon up the kings of England between the
Norman Conquest and the sixteenth century you will
find that half of them were temporarily or permanently
deprived of power by popular or baronial insurrections.
Foreigners in the sixteenth century used scornfully
to contrast the turbulence and waywardness of the
English people with the loyalty and obedience of
other nations. Indeed, I once heard an exponent of
the ordinary view urge almost in the same breath that
the insurrections of the sixteenth century proved the
u6 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
unpopularity of the Tudors, and that popular acquies-
cence proved the servility of the people. I don't think
that argument will hold water, nor do I think that
the evidence bears out the alleged subservience of
Parliament.
It is true that the House of Lords showed little
initiative or independence; and that can easily be
explained. The lay peers were dependent on the
Crown ; they had ceased to represent the military forces
or the wealth of the realm ; even its landed property
was no longer so exclusively in their hands. They
stood on no independent basis, and the spiritual peers
who formed a majority of the House were first
rendered powerless by their unpopularity and then
reduced almost to insignificance by the disappearance
of the abbots from the House of Lords at the dissolu-
tion of the monasteries. No similar conditions explain
the supposed insignificance of the House of Commons.
It is obvious enough that there was general harmony
between the House of Commons and the King, and this
is sufficient proof for those who imagine that Parlia-
ment must always have been subservient unless it
was in chronic opposition to the government. But
there is no proof that this accord was secured by the
despotism of the King or the servility of Parliament ;
that contention really rests on the utterly unproved
assumption that Parliament and people were opposed
to Henry's policy. If you want to establish the charge
of servility you must prove not merely that Parliament
did what Henry wanted, but that it did so in spite of its
own desires aTid principles.
PARLIAMENT 117
Now the means by which Henry VIII. is supposed to
have secured this subservience are these : interference
with elections ; creation of new boroughs especially
subject to royal influence ; bribery and corruption ; and
intimidation of the two Houses of Parliament. With
regard to the first it is only possible to say that
neither of the extreme views can be true. It is clear
that there was occasionally royal interference in
elections, but it is equally manifest that members of
Parliament were not all royal nominees. Where the
truth lies exactly between these two extremes cannot
be determined ; because such a solution would only be
possible if we had complete and impartial accounts of
every borough and shire election which took place in
England during the Tudor period. Such materials do
not exist ; even to-day it is difficult to say exactly how
much bribery takes place at a general election, and
even judges have been criticised for the point at which
they have drawn the line in various constituencies
between legitimate and illegitimate expenditure. The
most flagrant instance of royal dictation occurred at
Canterbury in 1536, when after 80 citizens had met
and elected two members, a command came down
from Cromwell to quash the election ; whereupon 97
citizens met and chose the candidates recommended by
the Court. But this is the most extreme case known ;
and, after all, the exception should not be taken as a
rule. We are told that this ounce of fact is worth a
pound of theory. It is perfectly true that an ounce of
fact is worth a pound of theory, but unfortunately the
pounds of theory are not all on one side, and ounces of
ii8 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
fact will stray from one scale of the balance into the
other. There would be no difficulty in deciding
between ounces of fact and pounds of theory, but we
have to decide between so many ounces of fact and
pounds of theory in the one scale, and so many ounces
of fact and pounds of theory in the other. In 1529, for
instance, we have a pretty full contemporary account of
the election for the city of London : as was the custom,
one member was chosen by the Lord Mayor and
aldermen, and one by the common Council ; there is no
hint whatever of royal interference. We have also an
account of a disputed election in Shropshire where the
rival parties canvass and cabal in the most approved
and modern fashion ; but again there is no hint of
royal dictation. A few months after Henry's death
there was an election in Kent ; the Council recom-
mended Sir John Baker, who had been Speaker of the
previous Parliament, and was Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The electors resented this attempt at
dictation ; the Council thereupon apologised, and said
that nothing was further from their thoughts than to
rob the constituency of its accustomed freedom of
election ; but they would take it kindly if Sir John
Baker found favour in the electors' eyes. But the
electors refused to be mollified, and Sir John, despite
the Council's influence, had to find a seat elsewhere.
Testimony to the same effect is given by a contem-
porary pamphlet called The Complaynt of Roderick Mars,
which upbraids the electors for the kind of representa-
tives they chose ; they preferred, laments this Radical,
' such as be rich or bear some office in the country,
PARLIAMENT 119
often boasters and braggers ; be he never so very a fool,
drunkard, extortioner, never so covetous and crafty
a person, yet if he be rich, bear any office, if he be a
jolly cracker and bragger in the country, he must needs
be a burgess of Parliament. Alas ! how can any such
study or give any godly counsel for the Common-
wealth?' Here the whole responsibility for the
character of members of Parliament is thrown on the
constituencies, and not upon the alleged practice of
royal nomination. The influence is not that of the
King or the Court, but the corrupt influence of wealth.
And we find precisely the same complaint made in
Cecil's papers in 1559. 'Merchants,' it is said, 'have
grown so cunning in the task of corrupting, and found
it so sweet that since the first year of Henry vill.
there never could be won any good law or order which
touched their liberty or estate ; but they stayed it,
either in the Commons or higher house of Parliament, or
else by the Prince himself, with either le roy non veut or
le roy s'avisera ; and if they get the Prince to be
advised they give him leave to forget it altogether.' It
is not easy to harmonise this picture drawn by a con-
temporary hand with the fancy modern sketches of a
Parliament simply registering royal edicts.
On the other hand, there were some exceptional
constituencies in which royal nomination was the
rule ; at Calais, for instance, the King nominated one
member, the other was elected, and the same custom
appears to have been observed in royal boroughs.
These were probably few in number; and the great
mass of nominees returned to Parliament were the
120 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
nominees of great magnates like the Duke of Norfolk
or the Bishop of Winchester. Smaller lords sometimes
enjoyed this privilege : the Copley family, who were
lords of the manor of Gatton, returned the member
for that borough, because, we are told, 'there are no
burgesses there.'
But of any general or systematic attempt to pack
the Parliament of 1529 there is no evidence; and,
considering the thousands of letters and state papers
surviving from that period, the argument from silence
is particularly strong. There is one document which
has been taken to prove the packing of this Parlia-
ment, and that is a well-known letter to Cromwell
concerning his election to Parliament, and his under-
taking to conform to the King's wishes therein. If he
would give this undertaking, he was to be nominated
for Oxford or one of the boroughs in Hampshire.
The letter has been misunderstood, because Crom-
well was seeking to enter the King's service, and his
engagement was to be taken not as a member of Par-
liament, but as servant to the King. The presence of
such in Parliament undoubtedly enabled the govern-
ment to influence Parliament, but so does the presence
of ministers to-day, and it would be a poor sort of
government which had no such means of exercising
influence. Perhaps, too, it is worth noting that Crom-
well was not, as a matter of fact, elected for any of
the constituencies suggested in this letter ; he actually
sat for Taunton. More interference is traceable in the
general election of 1539, when Cromwell endeavoured
to secure the election of personal adherents in some
PARLIAMENT 121
constituencies ; but the futility of his efforts is apparent
from the fact that this very Parliament passed the
bill of attainder against him without a dissentient
voice. Equally futile was the one real attempt made
in the sixteenth century to secure a packed Parlia-
ment. This was in March 1553, when Northumber-
land's unpopularity had driven him to his wits' end
to find means for carrying on the government. That
the method was unusual is obvious from a letter
from Renard, the Spanish ambassador, to Charles V.,
when he asks in August 1553 whether Charles would
advise Mary to summon a general Parliament or an
assembly of notables after the fashion introduced by
the Duke of Northumberland. Even this assembly
proved refractory, and Northumberland's attempt and
those of James i. and Charles I. all go to prove the
inadequacy of the packing of Parliament as a method
of government. The mere fact of the attempt being
made is evidence of a conscious antagonism between
King and people which only existed in Tudor times
under Northumberland and Mary ; in each case it was
proof, on the part of the government, of failure, and an
omen for the speedy reversal of its policy.
The case with regard to the creation of boroughs
breaks down even more completely, at any rate as far
as Henry vili. is concerned; for recently published
Parliamentary records show that only some half a
dozen new boroughs were created before Northumber-
land's regime ; and there is no evidence to show that
a single one of these creations was due to sinister
motives rather than to Henry's policy of extending
122 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
the Parliamentary system by granting representation
to new centres of population, and by bringing within
it Wales, Cheshire, and Calais. The creation by
Northumberland of eleven new boroughs in Cornwall,
where Crown influence is said to have been predomi-
nant, does look suspicious ; and Mary's and Elizabeth's
large additions to the number may perhaps be ascribed
to sinister motives ; but I doubt it. The Journals of
Parliament, which was usually vocal enough on its
privileges, contain no hint of resentment at these
alleged attempts to pack it; and it is questionable
whether the movement originated with the govern-
ment at all. At any rate, we find in Elizabeth's reign
that a committee was appointed by the House of
Commons to consider the claims of various boroughs
which had allowed their representation to lapse and
now wanted to recover it ; that among these boroughs
were Tregony, St. Germains, and St. Mawes in Corn-
wall, which are usually supposed to have been created
by royal command to suit the royal convenience ; that
the member for Tregony, instead of being a minion
of the government, was Peter Wentworth, one of the
most courageous and assertive champions of Parlia-
mentary liberty who ever opposed the Crown or suffered
in the Tower ; and that his brother Paul, who was
scarcely less distinguished as a Parliamentary critic of
the Crown, sat for Liskeard, another Cornish borough.
If these Cornish boroughs were really created in order
to make the House of Commons subservient, the
Crown was indeed hoist with its own petard ; it rather
looks as though these Cornish boroughs, with their zest
PARLIAMENT 123
for Protestantism and the sea, were nurseries of political
independence rather than of political subservience.
Of bribery employed by the Crown to corrupt
Parliament there is scarcely a trace in Tudor times,
except in so far as the dissolution of the monasteries
was a gigantic bribe. Henry vin. was too lordly,
Elizabeth too parsimonious, to lavish bribes on in-
dividual members of Parliament. There was of course
that subtle form of influence by which hope of pro-
motion induces members to prophesy smooth things
to those who can promote. * Preferment,' runs a verse
from Scripture, 'cometh neither from the East, nor
from the West, nor from the South/ and an ambitious
divine in the reign of George III. selected this as his
text when preaching before Lord North, then Prime
Minister. So long as ambition remains a human
motive, men will always flatter the powers that be;
and one is rather surprised at the amount of indepen-
dence shown even by the Privy Councillors in the
Parliaments of Elizabeth. They did not by any means
merge their character as members in their character
as ministers ; and were habitually associated with their
fellow-members in urging upon the Queen advice which
they knew would be distasteful to her. The Tudors,
even Elizabeth, always knew, while the Stuarts did
not, how to distinguish between courtiers and coun-
cillors ; flattery was not a road to the Council, however
much it might pave the way to the Court.
Lastly, we come to the idea that Parliament ap-
proved of the measures of Henry vill. solely because
it had no option in the matter, because, whatever its
I24 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
own views may have been, it could not venture to
express disagreement with the King by voice or by
vote. Against that contention I can only say that
no one has yet produced a single instance in which
Henry vili. punished or attempted to punish a member
of Parliament for any vote or speech within the walls
of Parliament. Bishop Gardiner, writing to Protector
Somerset in 1 547, categorically states that there was
complete freedom of speech in Parliament in Henry's
reign, and apologises for the length of his letter by
comparing himself with members of the Lower House
who thought that, once on their legs, they had a right
to go on as long as they liked. The principle was
formally admitted in 1512 in Strode's case ; and about
the same time we find Convocation enviously petition-
ing for the same freedom of speech as was enjoyed by
Parliament. Nor was this freedom accorded because
members always spoke smooth things. In the Refor-
mation Parliament two members urged Henry to take
back Catherine of Aragon as his wife and thus avoid
the necessity for ,the military and naval expenditure
for which he was seeking a Parliamentary vote. Others
hotly asserted that if Henry taxed his people more he
would meet with the fate of Richard III. ; plain speak-
ing could not further go, but impunity accompanied it.
So, too, the House absolutely refused to pass the bill
for the pardon of the clergy unless the laity were
also included. Henry grumbled a bit, and said he
could if he liked pardon the clergy without Parlia-
mentary sanction, which was true ; but he thought it
wiser in the end to yield. This was not a solitary
PARLIAMENT 125
instance ; many bills in Henry's reign were rejected or
amended by the House of Commons, and the idea
that Parliament did nothing but register royal edicts
cannot stand for a moment after an examination of the
Parliamentary proceedings of the reign. Similar in-
stances might be quoted from the reigns of Edward vi.,
Mary, and Elizabeth. Under Somerset the Commons
rejected measures favoured by the Protector for the
amelioration of social distress ; under Northumberland
they rejected a treason bill ; under Mary they rejected
her first bill for the restoration of Roman Catholicism ;
under Elizabeth dozens of bills were rejected by small
or large majorities. Of course no one denies that
pressure was brought to bear ; the point is that that
pressure was neither violent nor unconstitutional, that
it often failed, and that Parliament was a free force to
be reckoned with and not a negligible quantity of
dependants on the royal will.
Another privilege, upon which Parliament prided
itself, was freedom from arrest, not merely for its
members but for its members' servants. It was claimed
by the House in 1543 and acknowledged by Henry vili.
in a remarkable speech, in which he asserted that
the royal dignity never stood so high as in the time of
Parliament, when he as head and they as members
were conjoined and knit together in one body politic,
so that an offence to the meanest member of the
House was an offence against the King and whole
Court of Parliament. Herein he was adumbrating the
sound constitutional theory that the King in Parliament
is the real sovereign, and expressing that unity between
126 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
King and Parliament which gave him his extraordinary
strength. He arrested no member ; and even Eliza-
beth, who violated this principle by the imprisonment
of Peter Wentworth, paid homage to it by pretending
that the punishment was not for any words spoken in
the House of Commons. Henry's system was in fact
the reverse of the Stuart system ; he tried to have as
much, they as little, as possible to do with Parliament.
He sought Parliamentary authorisation for all his acts ;
they sought to show that their acts needed no Parlia-
mentary sanction. He consulted Parliament on all sorts
of questions in which there was no constitutional obliga-
tion for him to do so ; they refused to consult Parliament
on questions in which it was constitutionally obligatory.
He could use Parliament, and did not wish to dispense
with so valuable a weapon ; they could not use Parlia-
ment, and wished to do without it. To them it was a
stumbling-block, to him it was a stepping-stone.
And so it was that Henry vill. encouraged, fostered,
and developed Parliament ; he respected its privileges,
he recognised its authority, he extended its sphere ;
and he helped to forge the weapon which was to over-
throw the monarchy. This was no part of his design,
but he was not responsible for the Stuarts ; he even
sought to exclude them from the throne. Nor would
he have developed Parliament if he had been conscious
of Parliamentary opposition to his policy. He was an
opportunist, and his system was based on the circum-
stances of his time. Those circumstances changed ;
they ceased to exist in Elizabeth's reign. Both parties
began to get independent and a little arrogant. Par-
PARLIAMENT 127
liament began to think it could do with a little less
monarchical help and supervision : and the monarchy
thought it would be happier without its Parliamentary
mate. Their mutual affection cooled, but no divorce
was possible. Parliament and the Crown were bound
together by law and necessity, and the result was an
acrimonious domestic struggle as to which should be
the predominant partner. The decline of the monarchy
begins in the reign of a Queen, which, perhaps, was
proper and was certainly natural in an age which did
not believe in the equality of the sexes. But it was
mainly due to the growth of Parliament and of the
forces which it represented. Parliament, encouraged
and educated by Henry vill., grew conscious of its
strength. Internal peace produced prosperity; Puri-
tanism begat a stubborn and stiff-necked generation
impervious to the wiles of Tudor Queens. From the
palmy days of Athens dominion of the sea has been
associated with democratic impulse ; and English and
Dutch sea-dogs could not brook a despotism. Eliza-
bethan literature signifies an awakening of national
consciousness. Even religious controversy had forced
men to take one of two sides, and thus to think and
form opinions for themselves. The Spanish dominion
of Queen Mary's reign provoked a national reaction ;
and Elizabeth had not been long on the throne before
Parliament began to assert its voice against the Crown.
Its advice was not always wise, and its ground against
the government was often badly chosen. It could not
force the Queen to marry, but it went further in the
attempt than any modern Parliament would do ; and
128 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
its arguments against the Queen of Scots were both
futile and ferocious, betraying more theological passion
than political wisdom. It needed training and ex-
perience before it could be trusted to manage national
affairs, but it was feeling its feet. It had got the idea
that it was to be something more than the sleeping
partner in the government. Men began to keep
journals of Parliament as records of importance. It
afforded a sphere for ambition ; and ambitious men
began to seek a seat in Parliament. For the first
time heirs to peerages are proud to sit in the House of
Commons ; and it is in keeping with the part played
by the family of Russell in English Parliamentary
history that the first two instances of this practice, now
so common, are those in which the eldest sons of the
first and second Earls of Bedford secured election to
the House of Commons. Membership became a privi-
lege rather than a burden. Men were ready to pay for
it ; not merely to serve without wages, but to pay con-
stituencies for electing them, and the first instance of the
bribery of a constituency occurs in Elizabeth's reign.
This meant a new spirit of Parliamentary pugnacity;
and the assertiveness of the House of Commons pro-
voked many a quarrel with the House of Lords and
much resistance from the Crown. Parliament passed
many measures distasteful to the government, and no
sovereign vetoed more bills than Queen Elizabeth.
She began to impugn the privileges of Parliament ;
she tried to deny the right of the Commons to decide
whether a Parliamentary election had been valid or
not, and she failed. Possibly it was at her instigation
PARLIAMENT 129
that Speaker Onslow, who was the Queen's serjeant-
at-law, omitted to claim the privilege of free speech in
1566. The omission was reprobated by the House,
and this experiment was not repeated. But the Queen
went further, and on one occasion roundly declared
that Parliamentary freedom of speech consisted simply
in saying 'yea' and 'nay.' This, again, was promptly
and successfully repudiated by the Commons, and they
likewise compelled the Queen to abandon her practice
of granting monopolies.
The divergence increased after the Spanish Armada,
when men felt that the external danger had passed
away, and that there was no longer need of a royal
dictatorship hedged about with special sanctions and
endowed with special powers. And the last years of
Elizabeth's reign shade off imperceptibly into the first
years of the Stuarts. For almost every claim put
forward by James I. and Charles i. you can find a
precedent under Elizabeth. In 1601 Mr. Serjeant
Hele averred in the House of Commons that the
Queen had as much right to all the lands and goods
of her subjects as to any revenue of her crown : * at
which,' says the Parliamentary diarist, 'the House
hummed, and laughed, and talked.' 'Well/ quoth the
Serjeant, 'all your humming shall not put me out
of countenance/ The Speaker intervened and the
Serjeant proceeded, and * when he had spoken a little
while, the House hummed again, and he sat down.'
The Stuarts went no further than this Elizabethan
Serjeant ; but there came a time when the House did
more than hum, and laugh, and talk.
I
130 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
VI
SOCIAL REVOLUTION
HITHERTO we have been dealing mainly with the mon-
archy and with the upper and middle classes of English
society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; for
Parliament, it must be remembered, only represented a
small fraction of the population ; and it is npt_unttt very
recent times, indeed, that the bulk of the English nation
has found adequate means of expression in the House
of Commons. Now, human nature being what it is,
the class which has enjoyed power has always exercised
it, consciously or unconsciously, in varying degrees in
its own interests. Aristotle pointed that out long
enough ago, and Hobbes on that supposition based
his plea for a monarchy : the interests of a monarch,
he said, would be those of the whole nation. That
contention is hardly borne out by the records of
history. Henry II. had barely elaborated an efficient
governmental machine before Richard I. and John
began to use that machine to extract money from their
people for their own particular ends. The possession
of a sharp sword is always a strong temptation to use
it ; and overgrown armaments are always a threat to
the peace of the world. So the possession of absolute
power inevitably tends to make its possessor arbitrary
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 131
and to impair his character. We can trace that process ^^^
in Henry vill., in Elizabeth, and in almost every
monarch who has wielded despotic sway. But aristo-
cracies have not been much better. As soon as the
English nobles had weakened the throne, they pro-
ceeded to usurp its powers and use them to strengthen
their own position and privileges. Their land had
been granted to William the Conqueror's barons to
be held as a trust, and on condition of its bearing the
whole burden of national defence. Gradually the
obligation was repudiated, and the trust was turned
into absolute property to be enjoyed as the owner
pleased, instead of being administered in the national
interest. The House of Lords was, in the^ days of i
Edward I., an assembly of royal nominee^ selected by
the King for particular purposes ; there was no idea
that the son was necessarily fit for this function
because his father had been, and eldest sons were
not summoned, as a matter of course, to the Upper
House. The Crown could exercise its discretion ; but
in the seventeenth century, by a decision of the peers
themselves, and not by any Act of Parliament, it was
established that the Crown had no rights in the
matter, and the House of Lords became hereditary.
By the same influence the land-tax, which had been
an easy substitute for the feudal obligation of military
service, was shifted on to the brewers ; and special
laws were passed to protect the game of the land-
owners ; whole districts in the Highlands have been
depopulated to provide sport for dukes and marquises,
just as William the Conqueror created the New Forest.
132 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Elsewhere forestry and agriculture have been sacrificed
in the same class interest. Then in their turn the
upper middle classes became predominant ; they con-
trolled the House of Commons, not the House of
Lords ; but, when in the eighteenth century the
House of Commons had seized political power, it
was no more inclined than the Stuarts had been to
share it with others. The reporting of speeches, the
publication of division - lists, and the presence of
strangers in the House were all prohibited, lest, as
it was said, there should arise some idea that members
were responsible to some authority outside the walls
of the House. It wa^this repudiation of responsibility
to the nation which laid the House open to the in-
trigues, the corruption, and intimidation of George III. ;
the King could never have defied the nation ; he could
defy a corrupt and irresponsible House of Commons.
So, too, the dominant interest of the middle classes
was mercantile, and thus we get the mercantile system.
The influence of money competed with that of land ;
Ireland was ruined and colonies lost in order to protect
the English commercial classes ; and sordid interests
had much to do with wars of the eighteenth century.
Even the great Revolutionary war began as much
because the French opened the Scheldt and threatened
to make Antwerp the rival of London as because they
had cut off the head of their King. In the wars of the
Spanish and Austrian succession England fought
largely in order to secure a share in the Spanish-
American trade ; and the price for which England
and Holland sold their alliance to Austria was the
1 «W<
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 133
prevention of the Austrian Netherlands from com-
peting with their commerce or forming an East India
Company. The war against Napoleon would not have
been waged so persistently, had it not incidentally
delivered into England's hands the carrying trade of
the world. Now this middle-class predominance is
passing away, and there are not wanting signs that
the masses, to which power has come by reason of
numbers, are demanding a long-deferred share in the
good things of life and of politics. Whether democracy
will be more national in its outlook and less dominated
by class interests than monarchy, aristocracy, and
bourgeoisie, remains yet to be seen.
It will therefore be readily understood that in the
Sixteenth century there was little sympathy between
Parliament and the mass of the people, and that there
was a good deal of social discontent, which could find
no outlet except by way of revolution. Indeed, this
lack of sympathy was one of the causes for the weak-
ness of Parliament against the Crown in the sixteenth, as
well as in the eighteenth, century. The peasants were
much more concerned with the thousand and one petty
tyrants of the village than with the one great tyrant on
the throne; and they were rather inclined to look to
the tyrant on the throne to protect them against the
tyrants of the village, from whose ranks the county
members of Parliament were invariably chosen. This
trust in the monarchy was only repaid in a very partial
manner, for the peasant was not politically effective ;
he had no vote, and the Tudors always wanted a quid
pro quo, and expected political support in return for
134 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
any favours which they might bestow. They chose
the strongest forces on which to rely: and Pro-
tector Somerset found to his cost that the good
wishes of the peasants and of town proletariat
were little protection against the solid ranks of the
landed gentry and middle classes.
The social unrest of the sixteenth century was the
result of the break-up of the feudalism of the Middle
Ages. Feudalism was essentially a conservative
organisation of the social system ; and it is commonly
spoken of as though it combined all the evils which it
is possible to inflict upon mankind. But this is by
no means a fair statement of the case ; feudalism had
its advantages even from the point of view of the
peasant. Jt is true that he had little liberty, but he
also had less worry than he has at the present time. The
struggle for existence was not so keen, and he was more
secure of food and lodging than he is under the economic
conditions of to-day. He was not treated with much
respect, but he was treated with a certain amount of
care. He was looked upon as being something
like a beast of burden, and his rights were extremely
few. But men pay a certain amount of attention to
their horses and their cattle, because their usefulness
depends upon their health and strength. So the value
of the villein to his lord depended upon his being
clothed and fed in such a way that hunger and want
did not impair his capacity to perform the services
expected from him by his lord. The feudal lords had
a direct personal interest in the well-being of their
dependants, which is wanting in the present economic
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 135
>%jbLsJt jLv^jJ
system. The whole of society was bound together
in a close mutual relationship, and was regulated by
an infinite series of minute and careful rules. Its
rigidity prevented development, but progress was not
desired. The ideal of the Middle Ages was, like the
old Greek ideal, conservative, not progressive : it was
a-to&iv TO ijOos, to preserve the existing type of social
and political organisation. Although the caste system
was never developed in England to anything like the
same extent that it was abroad, it was practically
impossible for the peasant to rise out of his class,
except through the portals of the Church. Even in
the city-states of Northern Italy, which are usually
considered democratic, liberty was collectivist and not
individual. As societies they were free, as individuals
they were not. The individual member of the pro-
letariat was tied throughout life to one fixed class,
one trade, one corporation, one parish, one quarter of
the city. His status was fixed as rigidly as that of
the villein, and everything was regulated for him from
the cradle to the grave. The only vent for individual
exuberance consisted in those faction-fights, which
were the most permanent and apparently the most
popular of all these medieval municipal institutions.
In the rural districts the organisation was not so close,
but the fixity of social arrangements was as rigid.
The number of holdings was almost stationary, and
the number of families fixed. Population accordingly
did not increase, and it is supposed to have remained
much the same from the Norman Conquest down to
the close of the Middle Ages. Now, the growth of
136 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
population is one of the great factors in producing
competition ; and thus one of the greatest stimulants
of modern times was lacking in the Middle Ages.
Everything was, in fact, regulated by custom, not by
competition ; and custom is perhaps the most char-
acteristic word of the Middle Ages. When Henry n.
draws up the Constitutions of Clarendon, he professes
merely to be enacting the good old customs ; the dues
which merchants pay on their wares are customs ; the
usual way in which land is held is customary tenure.
This excessive regulation produced stagnation, but
even stagnation has its advantages ; it does not
encourage strife, and class-rivalries were not so bitter
as they afterwards became. The Peasant Revolts of
the fourteenth century are a sign that the Middle
Ages are passing away. They proclaim that the
stagnation has come to an end, that the peasant has
caught a glimpse of better things, and that he wants
to reach those things by speedier paths than what
Wordsworth calls the ' meagre, stale, forbidding ways of
custom, law, or statute.' The ultimate causes of this
discontent were perhaps due to an improvement in
the position of the peasants themselves ; for it is not
when things are at their worst that men rebel. They
rise in hope, and not in despair. It has often been
remarked that the economic position of the peasant in
France at the end of the eighteenth century was
better than it had been earlier, and better than that of
the peasant in Germany or Russia at the same time.
Yet it was in France that the Revolution broke out.
So, towards the close of the Middle Ages, a certain
v,
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 137
amelioration in the lot of the agricultural labourer had
preceded the rising of 1381. Services had been
largely commuted for rents, and the serfs had achieved
their emancipation, though some remained in bondage
as late as the sixteenth century. Then came the
Black Death, which swept off so large a proportion of
the population, and depleted the labour market. The
scarcity of labour enabled the labourers to raise the
price of their labour, and to demand higher wages.
The landlords tried to meet this move by compelling
them to return to a state of serfdom ; and this attempt
caused the discontent which culminated in the
Peasants' Revolt.
The suppression of that rising did not, however,
mean a return to the old conditions ; the peasants
were not reduced to their former serfdom, their wages
did not materially suffer, and it has been maintained
that the fifteenth century was the golden age of the
agricultural labourer. Evil times were, however, in
store. The rapid development of wealth always
depresses those who do not participate in it. You
can feel the same thing when a millionaire, or a group
of millionaires, arrives at an hotel at which you have
been staying. Prices at once begin to rise, and attend-
ance on your wants to droop. After a time you find
that your resources do not permit you to stay; they
may have been all right before the advent of osten-
tatious wealth, but this advent has depressed your
position, and also, perhaps, your spirits. So, in the
fifteenth century, the advent of a capitalist class
depressed the condition of the peasants in England
138 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
and over the greater part of Western Europe. It was
not merely that the peasant became relatively poorer
than he was before ; he also suffered directly through
the application of commercial ideas to the system of
land-tenure. The merchant, who had made a fortune
in trade, used it to purchase landed estates, and thus
to make himself a gentleman ; but he could not avoid
importing into his new position the principles, or lack
of principles, which he had practised in the old ; he
could not help trying to make money out of the land
because he had been making money all his life out
of trade or manufactures. Now, the old feudal lords
had not regarded the land as something out of which
money was to be made; they had looked upon the
land as a source of men rather than as a source of
money. Their first requisite had been services, not
rents ; they wanted men to fight for them. ' The law
is ended/ ran a proverb of the time, 'as a man is
friended ' ; and a numerous body of retainers was the
best guarantee for the peaceable possession of one's
own property, and the most promising means of secur-
ing other people's. Even when not required for private
warfare, the tenant was wanted to plough his lord's
land, or reap his lord's crops. The feudal lord could
do without money, but he could not do without men.
He might work his estates so as to produce as many
men as possible ; he would not work them so as to
yield the utmost farthing in cash.
All this was changed when the peaceful business-
like trader took the place of the warlike feudal
lord. Private war was not to his taste ; and retainers
<vJS~G-v v-- Vj ^ -^VwvpJt1 1 1 \
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 139
were looked at askance by Henry vii. and his suc-
cessors. Land as a source of men began to lose its
attraction ; but, as a source of wealth, it was more
sought after than ever. It was regarded as an invest-
ment, and was exploited on purely business principles.
Competition supplanted custom, and the excessive
regulation of the Middle Ages gave way to laisser
faire. The cash-nexus, as Carlyle called it, became
the principal tie between the landlord and his tenants.
Instead of mutual obligation of service and defence,
there was mutual suspicion, each party competing with
the other in its efforts to get the best of the bargain.
The capitalist, as usual, had the advantage ; and free
contract commonly means the exploitation of the weak
by the strong. There can be no really free contract
except when the two parties meet on something like
equal terms ; and when a man's living depends upon his
getting a job, he is hardly at liberty to decline an offer.
The position of the capitalists was, moreover, enor-
mously strengthened by a momentous change which
took place in the methods of cultivation, and made
agricultural labour almost a drug on the market. The
somewhat primitive methods of medieval production,
the lack of capital, and the economic arrangements
of the village community had made cultivation on a
large scale impossible. But these conditions had now
been altered ; capital was forthcoming, and business
capacity ; and men began to see that the old system
of petite culture was economically wasteful. They
began what was called engrossing lands, that is to
say, they accumulated a large number of holdings,
140 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
allowed all the tenements but one to decay, turned
out the independent yeomen, and put in their places
a number of hired labourers. That is one of the three
processes to which the name of enclosure is loosely
applied. Another of these processes was the conver-
sion of arable land to pasture ; and this was still more
prejudicial to the peasants than the change from culti-
vation on a small scale to cultivation on a large scale ;
for even cultivation on a large scale requires a certain
amount of labour, but pasture requires scarcely any
labour at all. When a sheep-run was formed out of
a number of holdings, one man and a dog could do
the work which formerly required dozens of yeomen ;
and many thousands of peasants were thus thrown out
of employment.
The third of these processes was the enclosure of
common lands; and the legal rights and wrongs of
this question have been much debated. If we believe
with Freeman, J. R. Green, Bishop Stubbs, and others,
that the original Anglo-Saxon village community was
an association of freemen owning its land in full pro-
prietorship, then all these enclosures were wanton
usurpations on the part of the lords at the expense
of the commoners. If, on the other hand, we believe
that the original Anglo-Saxon community was not
free, but dependent on a lord who really owned the
commons, then there was nothing illegal in these
enclosures, and the lords were only recovering a right
which they were in danger of losing through the pre-
scription enjoyed by their tenants. The Statute of
Merton in 1236 had permitted the lords to enclose
v ..
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 141
as much of the commons as they desired, provided
they left 'sufficient' for their tenants. This may be
interpreted as either the assertion of an ancient right
or the creation of a new one. In any case, the fact
that it was passed during the reign of Henry III.,
when the power of the Crown was almost in abeyance,
illustrates the way in which the nobles used their
opportunities in their own interests. Nor was it of
much practical importance to the peasants whether
they were suffering from the assertion of a long-lapsed
right or the creation of a new disability. In either
case the material hardship was the same. These
enclosures would be made for one of two purposes —
either to convert the open lands into enclosed pasture
land, or to convert them into enclosed arable land ;
but the former was fifty per cent, more profitable than
the latter, and consequently was by far the more
usual process with the landlords.
All these changes went on with enormous strides
after the middle of the fifteenth century ;^and they
involved a social dislocation almost unparalleled in
English history. To them must be ascribed many of
the evils which theological prejudice has attributed
to the religious Reformation. Nearly a century ago
William Cobbett, who had no particular theological
axe to grind, wrote a history of the Reformation, in
which he represented that movement as a revolution
of the rich against the poor ; and that line of argument
has been taken up by writers whose main object has
been to undo the work of the Reformation by casting
discredit upon its character. But the social revolution
^
142 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
was not the product of the religious revolution, though
the two movements doubtless had something common
in their origin ; neither would have taken place but
for the development of commerce, capital, and a middle
class. But the only way in which the Reformation
directly affected the social revolution was that the
Dissolution of the Monasteries brought into the general
stream of tendency lands which might otherwise have
remained outside. On the other hand, the only scholar,1
who has gone at all thoroughly into the materials for
the history of this agricultural crisis, declares that there
is little evidence for the conventional assertion that the
monks were kindlier landlords than the laymen.
The social revolution was due to causes entirely
independent of the religious and doctrinal movement.
It was not the Reformation which made sheep-farming
more profitable than corn-growing, and cultivation on
a large scale more economical than cultivation on a
small scale. Nor was it the Reformation which
necessitated the employment of foreign mercenaries
by the English government, and impaired the learning
of the English universities — both of which develop-
ments have by a somewhat curious logical process
been ascribed to the theological shortcomings of the
English government. The first argument is that the
religious changes were so unpopular that the govern-
ment could not rely on the fidelity of English troops,
and so were driven to hire Germans, Spaniards, and
Italians. The second is that the Reformers were
1 I. S. Leadam, Domesday of Inch sure s, 1517-18 (Royal Hist. Soc.,
2 vols. 1897).
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 143
ignorant Iconoclasts, who delighted in spoiling the
universities. Both results may be traced with much
more reason to the effects of the social revolution.
The employment of mercenaries was due to the
decay of the material on which the English military
forces had been based throughout the Middle Ages,
namely the yeomen. Military service had been a
local rather than a national obligation ; and, although
the forces were paid by the Crown, they were equipped
and provided by the various localities, and it was the
common calculation that each parish in England
could furnish one man to serve abroad in case
of need. But, when the yeomen were evicted in
thousands, and their tenements destroyed, this system
broke down, not only through lack of yeomen, but
because, in the words of a contemporary, * shepherds
be but ill archers,' and neglected those martial exer-
cises for which the yeomen, whose place they took,
were famous. A national standing army would not
then have been tolerated by the nation, nor could it
have been maintained by the feeble financial resources
of the government. It was necessary to have recourse
to the readiest expedient, and foreign mercenaries
were the only trained force ready to hand. So with
the decrease of the universities, it was due to the
financial straits of the class which had furnished the
mass of university students — the yeomanry. For
university education and, still more, university endow-
ments were originally intended for the poor and not
for the rich. But yeomen ejected from their lands
were in no position to send their sons to Oxford or to
144 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Cambridge, and the University of London did not
then exist ; just as to-day there are schools whose
prosperity varies inversely with the degree of agricul-
tural depression. So the numbers declined, and the
barbarous idea grew up, which still survives among the
backward classes in England, that a university educa-
tion is a privilege to which only a rich man's son has a
title, and that university endowments, bestowed for the
sons of the poor, can only be rightly enjoyed by the
sons of the rich.
These were some of the indirect results of the
economic transformation. It was the immediate re-
sults which impressed contemporary observers, and
they were startling enough. We have the unemployed
always with us ; but the ' unemployed ' question of to-
day is a bagatelle compared with the problem created
by the enclosures of the sixteenth century. According
to one calculation made in 1548, three hundred thou-
\ sand men had been thrown out of work by the decay
of agriculture — or abo\it ten per cent, of the whole
population. Here was the raw material out of which
the revolts of Tudor times were made. These persons,
complained one of the Supplications presented to
Edward Vl.'s government, ' had need to have a living.
Whither shall they go? from shire to shire ... by
compulsion driven, some of them to beg and some to
steal.' A great number of them, wrote a Bishop to
the King, ' are so pined and famished by the reason of
the great scarcity and dearth of all kinds of victuals
which the great sheep-masters have brought into this
noble realm, that they are become more like the
.'Jk>^>vxw \ O-vA/J -^AoA^- Of.
UMU-
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 145
slavery and peasantry of France than the ancient and
godly yeomanry of England.' The severity of the
statutes against vagabondage betrays the alarm of the
governing classes, and the frequency of their repetition
testifies to their failure to produce any effect. ' They
be cast into prison as vagabonds/ wrote Sir Thomas
More, ' because they go about and work not whom no
man will set at work, though they never so willingly
proffer themselves thereto.' Added to the misery of
unemployment was an enormous inflation of prices
caused by the influx of precious metals from the gold
and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, the scarcity of
victuals, and the debasement of the coinage. Without
going into details, it may be said that the price of the
ordinary necessaries of life trebled during the first half
of the sixteenth century, at a time when the overflow of
labour kept wages almost at their former level.
The government was neither blind nor indifferent to
this condition of affairs, but no English government
had hitherto been called upon to deal with so complex
and serious an economic problem ; and statesmen, who
had little knowledge of economic science, were not
likely to have much success in solving economic pro-
blems. The only alternatives which presented them-
selves to Parliament and to the Privy Council were
forcible repression either of the peasants or of the
landlords, or of both. Really remedial measures
were quite beyond the intellectual horizon of that
age ; and perhaps the crisis was one which no legis-
lation could meet. It is certain that the old medieval
system could neither be retained nor restored ; and the
K
f\S\ VXv
146 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
only question is, whether the transition from medieval
to modern economic organisation could have ^been
effected with less disorder, less permanent injury to
the poor, and less unfair advantage to the rich.
England has been described as a Paradise for the
rich, a Purgatory for the intellectual, and a Hell for
the poor. There is more truth in that somewhat
truculent antithesis than is pleasant, and it is grievous
to reflect that modern poverty is the creation of
modern wealth. There was, of course, poverty in
the Middle Ages, but there was no such immeasur-
able distance between the very rich and the very
poor ; no poor-law was found necessary until after
the social revolution of the sixteenth century ; and
starvation in the Middle Ages was the occasional
result of pestilence or war, and not the regular con-
comitant of normal economic conditions.
The earliest official recognition of the evils of these
changes appears to have been the Lord Chancellor's
speech at the opening of Parliament in 1484, when he
lamented that the body politic was daily falling into
decay through enclosures, through the driving away of
tenants, and through the ' letting down of tenantries.'
The Yorkist policy of siding with the lower orders
against the squirearchy was to some extent adopted
by the Tudors, and in 1489 and 1515 Acts were passed
against the accumulation of farms by wealthy in-
dividuals. But the only serious attempt to check
enclosures in Henry vm.'s reign was made by
Cardinal Wolsey in 1517. He may very probably
have been inspired by Sir Thomas More, who at this
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 147
time was high in Wolsey's favour, and had just
published his Utopia, in which enclosures were severely
censured. However that may be, Wolsey appointed a
commission of inquiry in 1517; and as a result of its
labours, he issued a decree for the laying open of all
enclosures made since the accession of Henry vn.
Even this was only a flash in the pan ; proclamations
to the same effect as the decree were issued in 1526,
but neither decree nor proclamation had any appreci-
able result. The old enclosures were not destroyed,
and new ones were made as rapidly as before. Wolsey
was immersed in his spirited foreign policy and in his
designs on the Papacy ; then Henry vill. followed
with his domestic and ecclesiastical embarrassments ;
and the advocacy of remedial measures for the social
discontent was left to a few individual thinkers and
writers. Some of them were Catholics, like More,
Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Lupset ; others, like
Henry Brynkelow and Robert Crowley, were Pro-
testants ; and they held advanced ideas on other
subjects than the question of enclosures. Brynkelow,
for instance, urged that all the proceeds from the
dissolution of the monasteries should be devoted to the
purposes of educational endowment — a suggestion
which, had it been adopted, would have made England
educationally the best endowed country in the world.
He also thought that both Houses of Parliament should
sit and vote together, for, he said, ' it is not riches or
authority that bringeth wisdom.'
But it was not until the reign of Edward VI. that
this party of reform obtained any real importance.
148 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
The most energetic exponent of its ideas was a certain
John Hales, who has fallen into undeserved oblivion ;
he was supported by the reformers, Latimer and Lever,
and Cranmer was in sympathy with their aims. But
the movement came rapidly to the front mainly
because it found a champion in the Protector Somerset
himself. Their cardinal principle was that man was
born primarily for the service of God and of the
Commonwealth. * It is not lawful/ declared John
Hales, ' for man to do what he lists with his own ; but
every man must use what he hath to the utmost benefit
of his country.' ' Let us have/ he said in his charge
when acting as enclosure-commissioner, ' this godly
opinion with us, that nothing can be profitable that is
not godly and honest, nor nothing godly and honest
whereby our neighbours and Christian brethren, or the
commonwealth of our country, is hurt and harmed.'
From their insistence upon the paramount claims of
the community, this party ,was called the Common-
wealth's Men ; and in the first Parliament of Edward's
reign they introduced various bills to give effect to
their ideas. One was entitled ' For the bringing up
poor men's children/ and it may have embodied a
socialistic suggestion, made by Brynkelow in the reign
of Henry viu., that a certain number of the poorest
children in each town should be brought up at the
expense of the community. Other bills were intro-
duced to secure leaseholders from eviction, and to
'prevent the decay of husbandry and tillage. But these
were all rejected either in the House of Lords or in the
House of Commons ; and the only social reform which
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 149
found favour in the eyes of Parliament was the famous
Act providing that collections should be made in
church for the benefit of the poor, and that confirmed
vagabonds might be sold into slavery. This was hardly
calculated to soothe or satisfy the dispossessed
peasantry, and early in 1548, if not before, they began
to revolt, in various counties, while others of them
preferred the more peaceful method of petitioning the
Protector. In response to these armed protests,
petitions, and perhaps also to Latimer's famous
sermon 'Of the Plough/ the Protector issued in June
1548 his proclamation against enclosures, and ap-
pointed a commission of inquiry into the whole question.
The proclamation spoke of the 'insatiable greediness '
of those by whose means 'houses were decayed,
parishes diminished, the force of the realm weakened,
and Christian people eaten up and devoured of brute
beasts and driven from their houses by sheep and
cattle.' The commissioners were to inquire into the
extent of enclosures made since 1485, and into the
failure of previous legislation to check them, and to
make returns of those who broke the law.
Some one has said that the way to an Englishman's
heart lies through his pocket : certainly, when you
touch his pocket, his spleen at once becomes active.
And this attempt to inquire into the illicit gains of the
landlords during the previous sixty years provoked the
fiercest resistance. The official classes had always
looked askance at the Commonwealth party; Somer-
set's own colleagues went into secret opposition, and in
the counties an organised plan was formed to burke the
150 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
inquiry. Only the commission over which Hales him-
self presided ever got to work at all ; and no stone was
left unturned to balk its efforts. ' I remember,' said
Latimer, * a certain giant, a great man who sat in com-
mission about these matters ; and when the townsmen
would bring in what had been enclosed, he frowned and
chafed, and so near looked and threatened the poor
men that they durst not ask their right.' The land-
lords, complained Hales, had the juries packed with
their own servants, and such was the multitude of
retainers and hangers-on that it was impossible to make
juries without them. Tenants were threatened with
eviction if they gave information against their lords ;
and the juries were sometimes indicted because they
presented the truth. * As it pleaseth my landlord, so
shall it be.' Other frauds were employed : one furrow
would be ploughed across a sheep-run, and then the
sheep-run would be returned as arable land. Or an ox
or two would be turned out among a thousand sheep,
and the land would be returned as land for the fatting
of cattle, and not for the growing of wool. To prevent
any appearance of vindictiveness, Hales had procured
a pardon for all the offenders returned under this
commission : the only result was that the offenders, as
Hales says, returned at once to their old vomit, began
immediately to enclose again, and were more greedy
than they were before.
The same spirit appeared in the reception accorded
to the bills promoted by Hales and the Protector in the
ensuing Parliament of 1548-9. A few minor proposals
were, indeed, passed : a tax of twopence was imposed
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 151
on every sheep kept in pasture, and the payment of
fee-farms was remitted for three years in order that the
proceeds might be devoted to finding work for the
unemployed. Another Act struck at rich and poor
alike. It was complained that victuallers and others
had conspired to sell their goods at artificial and un-
reasonable prices ; in other words, they had tried to
form corners and trusts, though we do not find mention
of book-clubs. On the other hand, it was said,
' artificers, handicraftsmen, and labourers have made
confederacies and promises, and have sworn mutual
oaths not only that they should not meddle with one
another's work, and perform and finish that which
another hath begun, but also to constitute and appoint
how much work they shall do in a day and what hours
and times they shall work.' In other words, they
wanted to establish trades-unions. It is important to
notice that even this Parliament, which was not
particularly sympathetic towards the poorer classes,
regarded a ring and a combine as being just as repre-
hensible as a trades-union. Both were opposed to the
public interest, and both were forbidden by law. It is
one of our modern plutocratic notions that, while
capitalists may conspire as much as they like to keep
up prices or to limit output, or to fleece the public in
any other way that seems convenient, workmen should
not be allowed in the public interest to combine at
all.
The bills passed by Parliament were, however, mere
palliatives compared with those they rejected ; and
Hales, who was himself a member of Parliament,
152 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
describes the fate of his measures to prevent the practice
of gambling with the people's food. One was to arrest
the decay of tillage and husbandry, by what expedients
we are not told : it was introduced into the House
of Lords, and there was slaughtered. Another was
designed to prohibit practices similar, on a smaller
scale, to the methods of the American beef-trust :
graziers were, says Hales, in the habit of bringing both
cattle and money to market, and then, if they could
not get their price for their own beasts, they would
buy up the market, and dictate their own terms. This
bill, which was also brought into the House of Lords,
was passed by them and sent down to the Commons.
There it met with a stormy reception ; it was tossed
and mangled, impeded by dilatory motions, and
referred to a committee of its enemies. It was, says
Hales, as though a lamb had been entrusted to a wolf
for custody.
The Protector was not turned from his course by
these Parliamentary checks. He avowed that in spite
' of the Devil, private profit, self-love, money, and such-
like the Devil's instruments/ he would go forward. He
issued fresh instructions to the enclosure-commissioners
in the spring of 1549; and, to provide speedy justice
for the poor, which they could not obtain in the
ordinary law-courts, he set up a Court of Requests in
Somerset House, of which his secretary, William Cecil,
afterwards Lord Burghley, acted as registrar. ' It is
our duty and our office,' he wrote, ' to receive poor
men's complaints.' And as a result of these com-
plaints, he was often brought into conflict with his
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 153
colleagues. Warwick's park had been ploughed up by
the enclosure-commissioners, and Warwick took the
lead in the opposition to Somerset's social policy. The
peasants, meanwhile, weary of waiting for redress which
never came, made up their minds that, in Hales's words,
they must fight it out or else be reduced to the like
slavery that the Frenchmen were in ; and risings began
in nearly all the counties of England. In Devonshire
and Cornwall the discontent was diverted into an
ecclesiastical channel, and made to appear as a protest
against the Prayer-Book and Act of Uniformity of
1549 ; but elsewhere it was seen in its true colours as a
purely agrarian movement. In Norfolk Ket set up a
commonwealth of peasants, in which no rich man did
what he liked with his own. Troops, intended for the
defence of English possessions in France or for the
subjugation of Scotland, had to be diverted to the
eastern or western shires. English strongholds in
France and in Scotland fell into the enemy's hands,
and their fall was used as a pretext for depriving the
Protector of office in the following October. The real
reason was the hatred of the majority of the Council
for his social and constitutional policy. The Protector
had tried an experiment in liberty : he had repealed all
the heresy-laws and all the treason-laws of Henry vill. ;
he had deliberately repudiated the Tudor system, and
endeavoured to govern by methods more suited to
the eighteenth or the nineteenth than to the sixteenth
century, while only an Independent Labour party would
have heartily supported his social policy.
The Protector's fall was followed by the complete
154 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
reversal of his schemes ; the Parliament, which met in
November 1549, was animated by a spirit of panic and
revenge. It not only repealed the Protector's measures,
but repudiated the whole Yorkist and Tudor policy
with regard to enclosures. These had over and over
again been declared illegal : they were now expressly
legalised, and it was enacted that the lords of the
manor might enclose wastes, woods, and pastures not-
withstanding the gainsaying and contradiction of their
tenants. It was made treason for forty, and felony for
twelve, persons to meet for the purpose of breaking
down any enclosure or enforcing any right of way. To
summon such an assembly, or to incite to such an act,
was in itself felony ; and any copyholder refusing to
assist in repressing it forfeited his copyhold for life. The
same penalty was attached to hunting in any enclosure
and to assembling for the purpose of abating rents or
the price of corn ; but the prohibition against capitalists
conspiring to raise prices was repealed. The masses
had risen against the classes, and the classes took their
revenge.
This must be borne in mind when we try to account
for the almost grotesque failure of Warwick's plot to
place Lady Jane Grey on the throne. His govern-
ment had been more arbitrary at home than that of
Henry VIIL, and feebler abroad than that of Somerset.
It was hated as much by Protestants as by Catholics,
and it was Protestants who decided the issue in favour
of Queen Mary. But the fall of the conspirators, who
had ruined Protector Somerset and his plans, brought
little redress to the peasants ; and half a century later
SOCIAL REVOLUTION 155
a sympathetic divine lamented that the enclosure move-
ment had turned merry England into sorrowful or
sighing England. Some relief came by weary stages
through the operation of natural causes ; the develop-
ment of home manufactures absorbed a certain amount
of labour, and over-sea enterprise provided occupation
for others. Eventually colonies supplied a home and
subsistence for thousands left in the lurch by the
economic march of events in England. But only the
most robust belief in the dogma, that whatever has
happened has been for the best, can blind us to the
vast iniquity and evil of the divorce of the peasant
from rights in the land which he occupies, tills, and
makes fruitful. England could not have run the race
for national wealth in the shackles of the Middle Ages,
and perhaps national wealth could only be bought by the
pauperisation of the poor. But, if absence of control
means that the weakest goes to the wall, and national
prosperity means that millions must hover on the verge of
starvation, we are brought face to face with the question
whether the product is worth the price, whether after
all the feudal system was so very much worse than
the present, and whether the social revolution of the
sixteenth century was a very great step in the progress
of man.
156 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
VII
POLITICAL IDEAS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
IT used to be said by an eminent professor of modern
history that it was a mistake to include more than one
definite idea in a single lecture, because that was as
much as the average audience could carry away. I
have paid you the compliment of neglecting this
advice ; but most people find it very difficult to
carry away more than one idea of the sixteenth
century, or to conceive of it as being anything except
. an age of religion and theology. Yet the political
| ideas of the century were at least as original as its
theology, and a great deal more apparent than its
religion. It is impossible to say whether they in-
fluenced religion more than they were influenced by
it ; but both factors have equally to be taken into
our account of the time, unless that account is to be
a one-sided, unveracious affair. If religion had been
[the supreme and only test, it would have divided
Europe into Catholic and Protestant parties, and not
into Protestant and Catholic nations. The sixteenth
was not in fact so religious a century as the twelfth or
the thirteenth ; there was no crusade ; the Armada, the
POLITICAL IDEAS 157
nearest approach to one, did not sail until Mary
Stuart had bequeathed to Philip II. her claims to the
English throne, and Philip would never have embarked
on that enterprise for the sake of religion alone. It-
can hardly be said that religion was the sole concern
of the Queen who married the Protestant Bothwell «-
according to Protestant rites. Political as well as
religious motives played their part on the European
chess-board ; there were black squares as well as
white ; and, while the bishops were supposed to keep^
to their own colour, all the other pieces — and especially
rival queens and their knights — might move upon "
either. It was not religion which fashioned the—
Anglican church on a national, the Lutheran church
on a territorial, and the Helvetic churches on a
congregational, basis. It was political conditions*^
which effected all these things ; politics had much to
do with making Germany Protestant and keeping
France Catholic. Impartial observers had some
difficulty in determining whether the War of the
Schmalkaldic League was, or was not, a war of religion ;
and one of the French wars of religion was also called
the Lovers' War. Secularisation, indeed, seems a
much more striking feature of the century ; religious
orders were despoiled and not endowed, and in the
wars of religion there was more war than there was
religion. Heresy was, whenever possible, identified
with treason ; for treason was more unpopular than
heresy, because men were more devoted to the State
than to the Church. Wyatt's rebellion enabled Mary
to execute heretics on the plea that they were traitors ;
158 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
and Elizabeth boasted that she did not persecute for
religion, because Campion and the others whom she
executed were disloyal to the State.
This predominance of the State is the all-pervading
political idea of the sixteenth century. It had complex
causes, some of which I have already tried to trace.
From the Renascence point of view its parent was
'Machiavelli, who, it has been said, released the State
'from the restraint of law. He only committed to
paper, and made a theory of, the practice of his time ;
and he has thousands of votaries to-day who would
indignantly repudiate his name. He simply pre-
ferred efficiency to principle, and held, in the language
of the Twelve Tables, that salus populi was suprema
^ lex. Bismarck and Mazzini thought the same ; tyran-
nicide and reasons of State are both Machiavellian.
The republican thought the tyrant might be slaughtered
for the common good, and the statesman believed
j, force and fraud to be legitimate means of serving his
country ; both agreed that the individual might be
sacrificed in the interests of the State. It is not easy
to deny the proposition, or to avoid the slippery slope
which leads towards Machiavelli. An ambassador,
said Sir Henry Wotton, is an honest man sent to lie
abroad for his country's good. A diplomatist who
told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
^truth, would not be a diplomatist, except on the
supposition that to tell the truth is the easiest method
of deception, because the truth is what men least
expect. But nowadays we begin to limit the sins one
may legitimately commit in the interests of the State ;
POLITICAL IDEAS 159
and the late Lord Acton would have applied to States
the same rigid code of morals which we commonly
apply to individuals. We begin to perceive that the
State consists only of individuals, and that the viola-
tion of individual rights and individual consciences in
the interests of the State does more harm to the
individuals than it can possibly do good to the State.
Machiavelli and his models were less squeamish ; in
politics a blunder was worse than a crime ; success
was the only test of an action ; expediency was more
important than lawfulness; the end justified the
means ; and the end was always the good of the States-
All this is pagan enough ; it was left to Luther to \
sanctify it, and to claim to have been the inventor of
the divine right of the State. The claim was not true,
because consciously or unconsciously he borrowed it
from the early Fathers. It was a natural reaction
against the divine right of the Church, and part of the
general appeal of the Reformation from the Middle
Ages to the primitive days of Christianity. The
Reformers set up the divine right of the State against
the divine right of the Church ; they did not advance,
as is often supposed, to the divine right of the
individual ; we have scarcely got there yet, though the
conscientious objector is making the effort in various
spheres. The right had to be divine, or it was not
much use in the ages of faith ; for men had less
reluctance then than now to saddle Providence with
responsibility for their own creations. All legitimate
institutions were regarded as of divine ordination.
Once divine and once legitimate, it was always divine
160 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
and always legitimate ; there was no idea of progress
or evolution, and, when men wanted to change an
institution, they had to allege that it had never been
legitimate. Hence all the talk about the 4 usurped '
authority of the Pope ; it was abolished in England on
that ground, and not on the more sensible plea that it
had lost its savour, and become incompatible with
national development. Providence, it was maintained,
had never sanctioned the Papacy*; that was a wicked
invention of self-seeking Popes. But Providence had
really ordained and sanctioned -the Sfatej^he King
was the Lord's Anointed ^rattier * than the Priest.
Christ, by living and dying under the laws of the
Roman Empire, had implicitly recognised its authority
and explicitly required men to render unto Caesar the
things that were Caesar's. St. Paul, the other Apostles
and early Fathers continued in the same strain, and
men invented a sort of Apostolic succession in the
State. The authority thus sanctioned had descended
through the ages to the emperors and kings of the
sixteenth century. Luther saw in Charles V. the
successor of Augustus and Constantine the Great, and
thought resistance was a sin. When circumstances
induced him to abandon this view, he transferred the
divine sanction to his territorial sovereign, the Elector
of Saxony. Englishmen diverted the line of succes-
sion from the Holy Roman emperors to their own
kings, and invented a legend to the effect that Con-
stantine the Great had conferred imperial authority
over the British Isles on King Arthur, from whom it
descended to Henry VIII. Hence the King's imperial
POLITICAL IDEAS 161
talk; it all fitted in with his designs on Scotland and
Ireland and also upon the Church, for there was no
ecclesiastical independence under the Roman and
Byzantine emperors, whom Henry vm. tried to
imitate. His ideas were perhaps Byzantine rather ^
than Roman, for it was at Byzantium that the depen-
dence of the Church was carried furthest and continued
longest ; and it was at Byzantium that the absolutist
maxims of the Roman civil law were elaborated in
theory and put into practice.
This imperial law made serious inroads upon the
common law of England in the sixteenth century.
Upon it was based the procedure of the Court of the Star
Chamber, the Court of Requests, the equity jurisdiction
of the Chancery, where all depended upon the expert
opinion of a judge and nothing on the common sense
of a jury. It was the foundation of the Council of the
North and of the Council of Wales ; * if we do nothing
but by the common law,' wrote a president of the
latter, ' it will be long ere these things be amended/
The State required the latitude and discretion allowed
it by the civil law, and emancipation from the bonds
of common law. Henry vm. prohibited the canon
law, but founded regius professorships of civil law at
the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge ; and a
doctorship of civil law is still the highest honorary
degree that Oxford can bestow. Protector Somerset
wanted to establish a college at Cambridge devoted
exclusively to the study of civil law : and Tudor
officials were nearly all civilians, not canonists or
common lawyers. Thomas Cromwell was the greatest
L
162 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
advocate of this system ; he recommended Pole to
study Machiavelli,1 who, according to Pole, had
poisoned all England, and would poison all Christen-
dom. Cromwell paid an English publisher to pro-
^duce a translation of Marsiglio of Padua, the extremest
champion of State against the Church in the Middle
Ages ; and he urged Henry VIII. to adopt openly the
.theory that the Prince's will is law. It is one of the
/testimonies to Henry's common sense that he preferred
Vthe advice of Bishop Gardiner, who said it was safer to
make the law his will than to make his will the law.
There is no more striking illustration of the com-
plete reversal of the medieval system than the fact
that these maxims of the State were adopted by the
: Church. Convocation in England took up the cry
about England being an imperial realm, independent
of the Bishop of Rome, and dependent upon a monarch
who was at once Pope, Emperor, and King in England.
The King was admitted to be the supreme judge in
matters of faith, and the ' King's Doctrine ' was used
as a synonym for orthodoxy. He had, it was main-
tained, been immediately entrusted by God with the
whole governance of his subjects in spiritual as well
as temporal things. Resistance to him was disobedi-
ence to God. So Cranmer informed the western
rebels in 1549 ; and this contention produced his
own difficulty in Mary's reign. He had unreservedly
1 This is the ordinary interpretation ; but see Paul Vandyke, Renascence
Portraits, 1906, App., where he gives good reason for believing that the
book recommended by Cromwell to Pole was not Machiavelli's Prince,
but Castiglione's Courtier,
POLITICAL IDEAS 163
adopted the theory of the divine right of the State i~"
to determine all things, including matters of faith.
Now in Mary's reign the State decided in favour of
the Papacy, and Cranmer had no logical ground on
which to withstand the decision ; he had never ad-
mitted the divine right of the individual. Hence his
recantations, which afford so easy a means of attack
on his character. In justice to Cranmer it may be
remarked that no one has yet found a logical answer
to the dilemma which distressed his sensitive mind.
If you admit, as all Anglicans did at that time, the /
right of the State to determine the national religion, 7
and deny the right of the individual to choose his own,
what are you going to do when the State establishes
a form of religion repugnant to your conscience?
Either your convictions or your conscience must go.
Cranmer doubted between the two ; his lifelong con-
victions at first proved stronger and he compromised
with his conscience. Then his conscience triumphed,
and he died in the flames with peace in his soul.
The divine right of the State or of Kings — for the
two came to much the same thing in the sixteenth v
century, when, in the phrase attributed to Louis XIV.
but invented by Voltaire, the State was the King— -..
became orthodox Anglican doctrine ; and, when Puri-
tans and Parliament began to attack the Church, it
had urgent reasons for putting its trust in princes.
But there was all the difference in the world between
this divine right and the divine hereditary right pro-
claimed by James I. The former was an ancient and
a comparatively reasonable idea ; the latter was new-
164 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
fangled, and about as irrational a theory as was
ever invoked to misinterpret history. The divine
right of the sixteenth century was a theological
counterpart of the Tudor claim to the throne ; and
that, if I may use a somewhat contradictory term, was
a de facto theory, and not a de jure theory. When in
1485 Parliament recognised Henry VII. as king, it
admitted a fact rather than a right. It did not say that
he ought all along to have been king : it merely recog-
nised the fact that he was king. And you may
remember that another statute of the same reign
denied that obedience to a de facto king could be
treason. That is the keynote of the Tudor period :
the title of the Tudors really rested on their ability to
govern, and not upon any theory of hereditary right.
So the divine right of that age simply recognised the
divine ordination of existing authority, without pre-
scribing the way in which that authority was to be
chosen ; that was a matter for Providence and, some-
times, the God of Battles.
This was the doctrine asserted in the canons drawn
up by Convocation in 1606. James I. soon discovered
a flaw ; his mind was acute, and he was conscious that
he had not, like the Tudors, established his throne in
the hearts of his people. What, he asked in effect,
would they do if some one treated him as Henry VII.
had treated Richard in. ? — this doctrine of theirs would
compel them to recognise and obey the usurper as
divinely ordained a de facto king. That was a horrible
thought ; for he was king de jure ; not all the water in
the rough, rude sea could wash the balm off from his
POLITICAL IDEAS 165
anointed head ; not all the canons of the Church or
the pikes of a usurper could destroy his right to the
Crown. For it was hereditary, an inalienable right
of birth, something which even the sovereign himself
could not destroy.1 Providence had not only ordained
the kings that be, but preordained the kings that ought
to be ; only through hereditary right could divine right
descend : that was the divinely selected channel of
royal prerogative. This theory was not an original
discovery by James I., though it was he who introduced
it in Great Britain. Henry of Navarre had asserted a
claim to the throne of France which depended solely
on hereditary right, against even greater obstacles than
those which stood in the way of James I. ; and Stuart
legitimists derived their reasoning from Bodin and the
Politiques of France.
Now, there were good practical reasons why James
attached so extravagant an importance to hereditary
right ; for that was his only title to the throne, and it
had prevailed over almost insuperable obstacles. The
greatest of these was perhaps the inveterate hatred,
between English and Scots, but there were also two
legal impediments. By both common law and statute
law James was debarred from the English throne.
He was an alien ; as such he could not by common
law inherit one foot of English land ; still less could he
inherit England. By statute law he was equally
excluded ; Henry vm.'s will had the force of a
1 This also became the French monarchical theory, and Louis xiv.
maintained that he could not, if he wished, deprive the Dauphin of his
hereditary right, which was divine. See Torcy, Mi 'moires , ed. 1850,
pp. 710, 711.
i66 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
statute, and had been confirmed by statute. By it
the descendants of Henry's younger sister, Mary, had
been preferred in the line of succession to those of
his elder sister, Margaret ; and so, according to the
law of the land, James was not Elizabeth's true heir.
He was only so by hereditary right, and hereditary
right was not the law of the land.
Now, the real reason why James succeeded in spite
of these obstacles is, of course, to be found in the
practical circumstances of 1603. The descendant of
the Suffolk line, Lord Beauchamp, was an impossible
candidate for the throne : his legitimacy had been
officially denied ; his personal character was insigni-
ficant ; and the advantages of a union between England
and Scotland were felt to outweigh the defects in
James's claim., But the king himself was too proud
and too pedantic to owe his elevation to such mundane
and transitory considerations : he attributed it to his
hereditary right, which he erected into a divine dis-,/
pensation and dogma. This again gives the keynote
of the Stuart period ; the dynasty claimed to exist
dejure% not de facto. The Stuarts pretended that their
abstract theory overrode all the practical necessities of
government ; that, whatever they did, they were kings
by unalterable right. Parliament could no more repeal
their divine hereditary right, than it could amend the
constitution of the universe. Fitness to rule, con-
formity to the national will, had nothing to do with
the matter. Their authority was something above the
law ; the law was derived from it, not it from the law.
Theirs was the divine, the only right : all other things,
POLITICAL IDEAS 167
like Parliamentary privileges, were matters of grace
which had been granted, and might be revoked, by the
Crown. The Stuart policy was throughout an attempt
to force the English constitution into the narrow com-
pass of this abstract system, to make facts conform to
fancies, and to subordinate government to a theory. It
was the reverse of Tudor policy, which had always con-
sidered the facts and left the theory to take care of
itself; the Tudors were content with the substance of
power, the Stuarts pursued its shadow.
This corruption of the Tudor into the Stuart theory,
of the divine right of kings into the divine hereditary
right of kings, ruined the Tudor system and spoilt the
Tudor theory, for which originally there was a good
deal to be said. Indeed, the ideas which underlay it
have subsisted to this day, and form the fundamental
difference between the English and Continental con-
stitutions. Starting from the axiom that salus populi
is suprema lex> and assuming that government is the
embodiment of the State and the expression of national
unity, political thinkers in the sixteenth century
deduced the idea that special sanctions, special im-
munities, privileges, and powers are required to protect
the State and its servants. The common law could
not provide for all contingencies ; a wide discretion
must be granted to the sovereign ; he must in cases
of necessity dispense with common law and make use
of his prerogative. The revival of the Roman civil
law coincided with this tendency of thought ; and the
various prerogative courts were practical expressions
of the idea. The function of the Star Chamber was to
1 68 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
deal with offenders and cases with which the common-
law courts could not deal; the Court of Requests
administered to poor men a justice which they could
not obtain elsewhere ; the Council of the North and of
Wales reduced to order turbulent districts which had
defied ordinary methods ; Chancery distributed equity
where the common law failed to provide a remedy.
The special command of the King was a sufficient
warrant for the arrest of a political suspect, whose guilt
was known to the government but could not be stated
in public, or conveniently proved in a court of law.
All this was tolerated so long as it was done in the
national interests ; but the system became intolerable
when it was administered by the government, not on
behalf of the nation, but against the nation on behalf
of the government. It was only practicable so long as
the nation consented, and the nation would only consent
so long as it felt the need of special protection and
agreed with the policy of the government. This condi-
tion began to disappear with the defeat of the Spanish
Armada, and from that date the influence of Roman
civil law, and of the ideas of prerogative government,
began to decline in England, though the struggle be-
tween the two sets of ideas fills much of the history of
the seventeenth century. On the one side we have
Bacon, Cowell, Hobbes, the Chancery lawyers, and the
Stuarts; on the other we have Coke, Selden, Prynne,
the common lawyers, and Parliament, who insisted on
the supremacy of the common law, and sought to
restrict the operation of reasons of State and of the
prerogative within the narrowest possible limits. They
POLITICAL IDEAS 169
denied the necessity for what the French call droit
administratif ', they asserted that the servants of the
government must be tried by ordinary tribunals even
for offences committed in the discharge of their official
duties ; no one was to be arrested or imprisoned merely
for reasons of State; there must be a definite legal
charge. The Crown was not above the law ; Parlia-
mentary privileges were matters of right and not of
grace; the executive must be controlled by the
legislature, the popular representative.
The struggle was of world-wide importance. In
1610 Dr. Cowell's Interpreter, a book which asserted
the prerogative in its most aggressive form, was burned
by the common hangman at the order of Parliament.
It was an indication of the coming victory of the
common law. A year before, in 1609, the Virginia
Company had been founded, and ten years later the
Pilgrim Fathers set sail. The founders of England's
colonial empire carried over the seas no despotic
maxims, derived from the Roman civil law and em-
bodied in Dr. Cowell's book, no ideas of the exemption
of governments from the ordinary law and from the
control of Parliament. They took with them, in their
hearts and minds, the principle that there should be
but one law, and by that law all men should be
governed ; and upon that foundation a hundred legis-
latures more or less are built and are building all over
the world to-day. In 1619 elected burgesses met at
Jamestown in Virginia, formed the first legislative
assembly in the New World, and the first-born child
of the mother of Parliaments saw the light. Those
170 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
children are now spread over the earth, and every one
has been nurtured and fed on the doctrine that the
/common law is supreme and not reasons of State or
Vj:he will of the Prince.
That characteristic differentiates the English con-
stitution, and those based upon it, from nearly all
other constitutions in the world ; and it may be worth
while attempting to suggest a reason for this singular
phenomenon. National character will not do as an
explanation, unless no better can be found ; and a
better can be found in environment. Compare, for
instance, the circumstances under which the last great
constitutional changes took place in France and
England. I refer to the establishment of the present
French Republic in 1870, and the establishment of
constitutional monarchy in England at the Revolution
of 1688 ; and we shall see how those circumstances
dictated one sort of constitution in France and another
sort of constitution in England. In 1870-71 France
was in the midst of the most disastrous war it has
waged in modern times. German forces occupied the
greater part of its territory ; the capital underwent two
sieges ; the Commune established a reign of terror in
its midst. Enemies from without devastated and dis-
membered it ; enemies from within threatened it with
domestic revolution. It was not a time when men
were likely to think much about the liberty of the
subject or the sovereignty of law. National existence
was at stake ; the supreme question was not how to
guard with minute and scrupulous care the rights of
the individual against the State, but how to save the
POLITICAL IDEAS 171
State at any cost. A government had first to be
organised and protected, and equipped with the means
for crushing anarchy, before the individual could think
of liberty. Reasons of State had to prevail over indi-
vidual rights, and the government of France was
hedged about with privileges, prerogatives, and powers
of which the government of England did not feel the
need.
Very different were the circumstances of what Burke^
loved to call the happy and glorious Revolution
of 1688. The supreme question then was not how to
protect England from invasion or from anarchy, but
how to protect the liberty, property, and religion of
English subjects against the attacks of an arbitrary
government. It was not the State, but the individual,
that was in danger. There was no need to surround
the government with special safeguards, to protect it
by administrative privileges, and entrust its interests
to prerogative courts. And so the prohibitions are
addressed not to the people, but to the sovereign ;
and the Bill of Rights is a whole Decalogue of com-
mandments which the king was not to break. In this
island the laws were not drowned amid the clash of
arms, nor individual liberty sacrificed in the interests
of the State. The simple and obvious fact that Great
Britain is an island has woven itself in a thousand ways
into the texture of English history. If in England
and nowhere else freedom has slowly broadened
down from precedent to precedent, it is because, in
Shakespeare's phrase, England is bound in with the
triumphant sea, because Nature had defined her
i;2 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
frontiers and thus relieved her of the greatest of
national tasks ; because, in working out her career
and in developing her constitution, she has not been
hampered and beset by that incessant fear of foreign
foes which has interrupted and retarded the growth of
freedom on the Continent.
Hitherto we have been dealing with the more
practical aspect of political ideas, with that side of
them which lies nearest to actual history. But it is
necessary to say something about the two great
writers of the seventeenth century who regarded
these questions from a more detached and philo-
sophic point of view. Of these two Hobbes is the
apologist of absolute monarchy, Locke of the Revolu-
tion of 1688. But Hobbes, although he passed nearly
the whole of his life in the Stuart period, is really the
exponent of Tudor, and not of Stuart, ideals. He was
a Freethinker, and there was little divine in his idea
of the State ; but his theory approached more nearly
the divine right of the sixteenth, than the divine
hereditary right of the seventeenth, century. His
sovereign, while absolute in theory, must be effective
in practice ; if he ceased to afford his subjects protec-
tion, they might throw off his authority, and this
passage rendered Hobbes suspect to the Cavaliers.
The Leviathan was written during the Commonwealth
and Protectorate ; its demand for a de facto absolute
sovereign would suit Oliver Cromwell much better
than the King over the Water, who had nothing
except the dejure claim of heredity ; and Hobbes was
accused of trimming his sails to catch the Cromwellian
POLITICAL IDEAS 173
breeze. Another point about Hobbes's sovereign
roused royalist suspicion ; he must have the right of
appointing his successor : that was the essential thing,
but the successor need not be the eldest son, and divine
hereditary right was unceremoniously thrown over.
Again, Hobbes's sovereign might be an assembly ; he
need not necessarily be a monarch ; but in all cases
he must be absolute.
Hobbes's demonstration of this truth is his greatest
contribution to political science, and it has been
generally accepted in modern times. It is the philo-
sophical expression of the maturity of the State which
had grown from childish weakness into theoretical
omnicompetence ; and Hobbes is the great exponent
of the idea, of which Luther and Machiavelli had been
the god-parents. We do not to-day regard the State
as divine or of divine ordination ; but we practically
admit that its authority is without legal limit. There
are many things which it may be unwise for the State
to do, and some would set up against it a divine right
of the Church, and others a divine right of the indi-
vidual ; but these are abstract rights, the real existence
of which is not open to practical demonstration. A
legal right is the only right which can be legally
enforced ; and legal right can only be granted and
sanctioned by the State, which can make anything
legal that it likes. This power can be delegated, but
it cannot be divided ; no other authority can be
admitted as co-ordinate with the sovereign State ;
and Hobbes was perfectly right in pointing out the
impossibility of dividing sovereignty between Parlia-
174 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
ment and the King. But he failed to anticipate the
modern refinement of a distinction between legal and
political sovereignty. In Great Britain to-day the
legal sovereign is Parliament, the political sovereign is
the electorate. An Act of Parliament may be law in
defiance of all the electors ; and all the electors
together cannot themselves make a law. But they
choose their legal sovereign, and the authority of that
sovereign is absolute. It is absolute over the Church
in theory if not in practice, and Hobbes was especially
severe against the Puritans who revived the medieval
idea of divine right of the Church. Nor had individual
conscience any rights against the State ; the individual
was bound to obey even against his conscience, and
Hobbes quoted for his comfort the licence granted by
Elisha to Naaman to bow in the House of Rimmon.
There was only one class of men who were bound to
go to the stake rather than to violate conscience, and
that was the clergy. It is the only clerical privilege
that Hobbes was prepared to grant.
The other great theory, embedded in Hobbes's
Leviathan, is that the State is founded on an original
contract by which every one is bound. The idea was
not by any means new : it had been used both in
England and abroad during the sixteenth century.
It occurs in the 'judicious Hooker'; it was adopted
in turn by the Huguenots and by the Catholic League
in France. The Huguenots employed it to limit the
authority of Catherine de Medicis and Henry in. ; the
League to keep out Henry IV. According to them
the contract was threefold, between God, King, and
POLITICAL IDEAS 175
People ; a breach of its implied terms on one part
absolved the others from their obligations. Henry of
Navarre had broken the contract with God by be-
coming a heretic ; therefore the Catholic people, with
divine concurrence, might elect another king, a Guise.
In spite of the theological ends which this contract
theory was made to serve, it seems to have really been
an unconscious attempt to provide a more rationalistic
origin for the State than that of divine ordination.
Hobbes, at any rate, had no theological ends to
serve ; and his idea of the contract differed from that
of his predecessors. They had conceived a contract
between sovereign and subjects, binding both of them.
Hobbes would not admit that the sovereign could be
bound ; the contract, he said, was not between sovereign
and subjects, but between all individual subjects to
make a sovereign. The people simply agreed among
themselves to set up an absolute sovereignty. Hobbes
explains this complete surrender of their liberties by
the conditions of the state of nature, in which men
lived before the institution of civil society. The state
of nature is, he says, a state of war in which every
man's hand is against every one else's, in which force
and fraud are the two cardinal virtues, and in which
the life of man is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.' Men in fact had no option ; they were in no
position to make terms with the sovereign. Any
means of escape was better than their existing con-
dition ; the most despotic government was an improve-
ment on anarchy. There is some truth in this as an
account of the abstract idea of sovereignty, though
176 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
one must divest it of the accidental characteristics of
the seventeenth century. The great objection to it
as a description of the origin of the State is that it
is purely unhistorical ; there never was any contract
at all ; at no time did men meet together and agree
to set up sovereignty. Sovereignty was not made,
it grew ; like the State, it is a child at first, and
Hobbes's idea is a reflection of the State in its man-
hood. Historically, too, we know that in primitive
times there could be no such thing as a contract
between individuals, for the individual had no individu-
ality ; it was not he, but the family or the tribe, which
was the unit of society ; and the development of the
individual is one of the latest growths of time.
The first reply to Hobbes did not come from Locke,
the apologist of the Whigs, but from Sir Robert Filmer,
who was a more orthodox Tory of the Stuart type
than Hobbes himself; and in his Patriarcha he set
himself to provide a political theory which should not
be capable of misinterpretation in the interests of a
Cromwell. It seems at first sight fantastic in the
extreme. Sovereignty he deduces by hereditary
descent from Adam and the Patriarchs, whose repre-
sentatives the Stuarts were in Great Britain. But there
is more in Filmer than appears on the surface. He
perceives the unhistorical character of the contract
theory, and tries to give sovereignty an historical
basis, although his history is bad. He also perceives
how both the theories of a contract and of absolute
sovereignty could be used against the royalist and
Anglican position in England. There was a funda-
POLITICAL IDEAS 177
mental agreement between the Jesuit and the Calvinist
political theory : both Parsons and Buchanan had
asserted that kings might be deposed : Calvin and
Bellarmine, writes Filmer, both look asquint this way :
and the only protection against them was the divine
hereditary right of James I. This theory had in fact
been adopted by the royalists and the Anglican
Church, and it was their belief in it which produced
the Nonjurors of William III. and Mary's reign.
Anglican divines of the sixteenth century would have
had no difficulty in swearing allegiance to a de facto
king like William III. It was the hereditary taint,
introduced by James I., which led the Church to
abandon the canons of 1606 and led Bancroft into
difficulties.
Locke's two Treatises of Civil Government were
written in reply to Filmer, but he feels that Hobbes
is the more serious antagonist, and the more solid
portions of the book deal with Hobbes's theory. Locke
had little difficulty in dealing with Filmer's history
and with a sovereignty whose title was derived from
Abraham. But in order to meet Hobbes, he abandons
the historical argument and reverts to the theory of
a contract. It is usually said that Locke supplied the
Whigs of 1688 with a philosophical basis for their
action at the Revolution : it is rather a philosophical
apologia ; for the Two Treatises were not published
until two years after the event, in 1690. This circum-
stance is a reminder of the fact that political philosophy
is not generally the parent of political action, but a
deduction from the accomplished fact. The Two
M
i;8 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Treatises are, however, an embodiment of the principles
of the Revolution, and were taken as a refutation and
repudiation of the Leviathan of Hobbes. Locke does
not, perhaps, reject the theory of sovereignty so much
as readjust the habitat of that sovereignty. The State
was just as omnicompetent after the Revolution as
before ; but the exercise of its sovereignty is not left
at the uncontrolled arbitrament of the monarchy. It
is entrusted to a composite entity ; and the sovereign
'power is no longer the king alone, but the King in
Parliament. Hobbes had imagined a contract by
which all power was surrendered into the hands of an
external authority; Locke imagined a contract by
which certain powers were delegated to the monarch,
while others were to be exercised conjointly by the
monarch and a representative assembly. Men in fact
had made terms with the sovereign, who was bound by
those terms. They were not in the parlous condition
fancied by Hobbes ; the state of nature was not a state
of war ; force and fraud were not the cardinal virtues
before the institution of civil society. Those phrases
only described the condition of wicked men ; but men
were not all wicked before the contract. Morals in
;,fact existed before politics, and were not, as Hobbes
seems to have thought, a deduction from politics.
Before there was a law of the State, there was a law
of Nature which kept men from the orgies imagined
by Hobbes. Their condition was tolerable, they could
afford to bargain with the sovereign, and set limits to
his authority. The contract was made not for the
sake of existence, but for the sake of a better existence,
POLITICAL IDEAS 179
for the benefits of civil society. These benefits were
endangered by absolute monarchy ; the Stuarts had
transgressed the original terms of the contract, and
usurped more than their allotted share of power. The
people were justified, therefore, in holding themselves
quit of their engagement, and making a fresh contract
elsewhere.
This is the theory of the English Revolution, but
Locke was perhaps less important as its apologist than
as the progenitor of Rousseau. He would not have
recognised his progeny, but that is sometimes the case :
and Rousseau put the contract theory to uses which .
would have horrified the Whigs. Hobbes had left
sovereignty entire in the hands of the monarch,
Locke associated monarch and people in its exercise,
Rousseau restored it all to the people. They alone
were the legitimate wielders of sovereignty, every
other sovereign was a usurper. Man was born free,
yet everywhere he was in chains because the people
had been cheated of their heritage by priests and
kings. The only way to reform the world was to
restore the sovereignty of the people ; and on that
basis the French Revolutionists went to work.
Rousseau was the last great exponent of the contract
theory ; indeed, before his book appeared, the bottom
had really been knocked out of it by Montesquieu, the *••
parent of modern historical method in political science.
Nothing could have been less historical or less true
than Rousseau's dogmas. Man is not born free ; he
is born helpless, and freedom is of little use to the
infant. It can only be granted him gradually in
i8o FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
exceedingly small doses. He is born into conditions
which determine his life ; and Montesquieu sought to
trace the influence, and show the importance of environ-
ment upon the development of man and his institutions.
He rejected the abstract, a priori, method of the con-
tractual school. It by no means followed that the
same thing was true or beneficial in all circumstances.
Mankind required different systems in different circum-
stances. Where only a few are capable of rule, the
few must rule ; democracy is only possible where the
many have attained a certain degree of intelligence,
self-knowledge, and self-control. Climate may make
all the difference ; self-government does not flourish
in the tropics ; nor tyranny in the temperate zones.
Every political system must be judged with reference
to its circumstances and not by abstract theories.
These are the contentions of the historical school,
of which in England Sir Henry Maine was the chief
exponent. He applied to political institutions the
same kind of reasoning that Darwin applied to the
natural world. Gradual evolution and not sudden
creation was the history of both. The State did not
originate in a single act, a contract ; it developed from
the family and tribe. Divine right, whether of the
Church, the State, or the individual, and abstract
rights derived from an imaginary secular contract, all
disappeared from political science, though not from
popular politics. States and constitutions have to
stand on their own legs without the support of abstract
rights, divine or other; they stand or they fall by
their adaptability to changing needs, and the idea of
POLITICAL IDEAS 181
development has supplanted that of fixed adherence
to a prehistoric type. Theories of divine right, whether
of Churches, or States, or individuals, have happily
failed to petrify human institutions, and have all given
way to a divine law of progress. The one immutable
factor in human affairs is their infinite mutability.
1 82 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
VIII
CHURCH AND STATE IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
OF all the factors which have contributed to the
making of the British Empire, none is more important
than the Union between England and Scotland. It is
difficult to imagine what the empire would be like
without its Scottish ingredients ; and it is a common-
place, that wherever in the British dominions there
is a good thing, there you will find a Scot not very far
off. Scots not only govern themselves, but others as
well; no one ever dreams of making anybody but
a Scot Secretary of State for Scotland ; and soon, it
would seem, no one but a Scot need apply for the post
of Prime Minister ; the present Premier and both the
living ex-Premiers are Scots. Independence offers as
few attractions to the Scots as the Zionist ideal does
to most of the Jews ; for it is poor sport ruling and
financing yourselves when you can rule and finance
other people.
But the mutual affection between English and Scots
is of modern growth. During the two centuries with
which we are dealing the blood- relationship between
the two races showed itself in a somewhat sanguinary
fashion ; and English and Scots fought face to face,
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 183
and not side by side, on the field of battle. Protector
Somerset had the right object in view when he
spoke of a united realm which, having the sea for its
wall, mutual love for its garrison, and God for its
defence, need not in peace be ashamed, or in war
afraid of any worldly power ; and he had some notion
of how these things were to be achieved when he said
that the way was, not to win by force but to conciliate
by love, to leave Scotland her own laws and customs,
to establish free trade, to abolish the distinction of
aliens between the two kingdoms, and to call the
united realm the Empire of Great Britain. But even
he fought the battle of Pinkie, and Pinkie is but one
link in the chain which stretches from Flodden Field
to Culloden Moor. Solway Moss, Dunbar, Killie-
crankie, Sheriffmuir, and Prestonpans seemed to show
that, whether England was ruled by Tudor King or by
homespun Protector, by Dutch William or by German
George, she would find insuperable antipathies north
of the Tweed, or at least of the Forth.
This antipathy has been ascribed to a variety of
causes, ranging from an inherent and mutual repug-
nance between Saxon and Gael to the effects of a
single battle. One writer attributes to Pinkie, not
only such immediate results as the revival of French
influence in Scotland and the marriage of Mary Stuart
to the Dauphin, but comprehensive phenomena like
the divergence between the English and the Scottish
Reformations, the refusal of both realms to complete
the Union in 1603, and the hatreds which found
expression in Dunbar and Worcester. It is rather
1 84 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
a long list of fatalities to follow a single battle, but
even greater results have been put down to the fact
that Cleopatra's nose was of just the right length to
fascinate Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Flodden
Field and Solway Moss might perhaps have done as
well as Pinkie, but for the fact that Somerset's states-
manship is a more conventional mark for critical
arrows than that of Henry vill. ; and, in any case, this
kind of criticism mistakes the occasion for the cause
and the cause for the effect. The divergence of the
English and Scottish Reformations and the failure of
the attempted union in 1603 were due to causes which
went a great deal deeper than any single battle or
series of campaigns.
To sum up this divergence, it may be said that
England in the seventeenth century was Erastian,
while Scotland was theocratic ; and my object at this
moment is to explain and illustrate this statement.
Now, Erastianism is a vague word with many mean-
ings ; it is derived from a German doctor of the
sixteenth century, Thomas Lieber, whose name, like
that of Melanchthon and a host of others, was
translated into a Greek form, Erastus. His view was
that the State, and not the Church, should exercise
coercive jurisdiction. But it has been denied that
Erastus was Erastian, just as it may be maintained
that Machiavelli was not really Machiavellian ; and the
modern use of the word seems to imply a right on the
part of the State to set up any creed it likes and
compel its subjects to acknowledge it. Erastus him-
self died in exile rather than admit this ; and modern
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 185
Erastianism is rather the policy adopted by Henry vill.
and expounded by Thomas Hobbes. Without attempt-
ing any exact definition, we may perhaps say that a
country is Erastian where the State, and theocratic
where the Church, is the predominant partner.
Now in England in the sixteenth century there is no
doubt that the State is the predominant partner. The
Reformation is a naked and brutal assertion of that
fact, which no amount of ingenuity can explain away.
It was forced on the Church and against its will by
the State, and it was not till late in Elizabeth's reign
that the Church accorded a conscientious assent to
a settlement extorted from it by force. In Henry
vm.'s reign the pretence of consulting the Church
through Convocation and the pretence of electing
Bishops by Chapters were kept up. But Chapters
had to elect the royal nominee within twelve days
under pain of praemunire. Even the taxes the Church
imposed on itself could not be collected till Parlia-
ment gave its consent. The only check which Henry
experienced from Convocation was when it inserted the
qualifying phrase so far as the law of Christ allows in
its recognition of the royal supremacy, and this has
been represented as an act of courage. It was no more
than a feeble effort of Convocation to save its face,
and the Imperial ambassador pointed out that no one
would venture to dispute with Henry as to where his
supremacy ended and that of Christ began. Even
these pretences were abandoned in Edward's reign,
when Bishops were appointed merely by Royal Letters
Patent, and when books of Common Prayer were
186 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
enacted without reference to Convocation. ' Parliament
establisheth forms of religion/ says Sir Thomas Smith,
who was Dean of Carlisle as well as Secretary of State ;
and it was Parliament alone which gave legal sanction
to the Elizabethan settlement.
Now the question we have to solve is, How came it
to be possible to treat the Church in this cavalier
fashion ? In other words, why was Parliament so
much stronger than Convocation? The answer is
that Parliament represented the feelings of the pre-
dominant middle classes and Convocation represented
only the clergy ; it did not even represent the Church
in our modern sense of the word. Nowadays we
speak of a Churchman in distinction to any kind of
nonconformist, and the Church party includes a number
of eminent laymen. In those days no layman could
be described as a Churchman ; the Churchman was
always an ecclesiastic, and only such were represented
in Convocation ; the rest of the people, who all belonged
to the Church, were represented by Parliament. Con-
vocation was thus the organ of a class, almost a
privileged caste, whose privileges existed at the
expense of the laity ; and thus it could not be the
organ of the mass of the people. Nevertheless, this
privileged class had been able to hold most of what it
called its own throughout the greater part of the
Middle Ages, because it had represented all the educa-
tion and almost all the intelligence and the enthusiasm
of that time. That was no longer the case ; enthusiasm
had largely forsaken the Church ; education was no
longer its speciality ; intelligence had spread to the
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 187
middle and upper class laity ; and even piety had
ceased to be mainly professional. The solid founda-
tions upon which clerical power and privilege had
been based had disappeared, and with them went the
acquiescence of men in clerical guidance and governance,
in clerical pride and prerogative.
The monopoly of the Church had broken down long
before the sixteenth century ; but for that fact, the
Reformation would not have been possible. The laity
had invaded the professions ; they had learned to read,
to write, and to think. The greatest educator in the
fifteenth century was Caxton, and the printing-press
was no respecter of parsons ; the greatest writer of
English prose in the sixteenth century was a layman,
Sir Thomas More ; and the only clerical poet of note
was the scandalous Skelton. The new forces of com-
merce, industry, and geographical discovery were in
the hands of the laymen ; and the enthusiasm was
patriotism, a national spirit unsympathetic to cosmo-
politan clericalism. Of this new public opinion
Parliament was the focus and the voice. It repre-
sented a national feeling which had not existed before,
although this representation was for a time concealed
by the predominance of the monarchy and the union
between King and Parliament. The alliance of these
two representatives of the State was irresistible by the
enfeebled Church. Hence Parliament prevails over
Convocation, State over Church, and England becomes
Erastian.
In Scotland the situation was curiously reversed.
Parliament was weak, and the Church, as reformed by
188 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
John Knox and Melville, was strong. To explain the
weakness of the Scottish Parliament, we should have
to go far back into the Middle Ages and into some
intricate questions of legal and constitutional history.
We can only indicate one or two points. Scotland did
not achieve internal unity so soon as England ; she had
no Henry II. to create a native common law strong
enough to resist the inroads of the Roman law ; and
the victory of Roman law across the Border is at
the bottom of the divergence between the present
English and Scottish legal systems. This lack of
common law was inimical to Parliamentary develop-
ment ; and Parliament in Scotland was only a system
of Estates similar to those which sank into impotence
on the Continent. There was no shire representation
as in England, and only tenants-in-chief could exercise
the vote : the freeholder, that backbone of the English
Parliament, was unknown ; and there was no co-
operation between the various social classes. The
boroughs stood alone, and only boroughs on the royal
demesne were represented at all. Legislation was
enacted by the Privy Council and not by the Estates.
It was a mere simulacrum of a Parliament ; and, when
it met, it delegated its functions to a committee or
clique known as the Lords of the Articles. No strong
monarchy had fashioned this feudal assembly into a
modern Parliament ; a series of infant kings and
disputed regencies had prolonged the feudal agony
into the sixteenth century, and Ruthven raids and
Gowrie plots were still the custom of the country.
Kings are kidnapped as of old, and 'bands' are
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 189
formed against a Queen, though the feudal * band '
has been converted, and calls itself a Covenant. We
hear much of these things, but little enough of Parlia-
ment ; for Parliament is weak, and is no organ or no
trumpet on which a middle class can play.
The ultimate reason, of course, was that Scotland had
no middle class requiring an organ to express or to re-
lieve its feelings. Scotland had been poor and pastoral :
only industry and commerce can make a Parliament.
When Russia has a middle class proportionate to its
size and population, it will also have a Duma which
will not be dismissed. But Scotland in the sixteenth
century was developing a trade, and consequently a
middle class. ' During no previous period/ says a
Scottish historian, ' had the Scottish people taken such
a forward stride at once in material well-being and
political importance. Mary's reign saw the end of
feudalism in Scotland and the appearance of a middle
class, which was thenceforward to determine the
development of the country. It is the sensational
events of Mary's reign that have drawn attention to it
beyond every reign in Scottish history; but, in truth,
its highest interest and importance lie in this trans-
ference of moral and political force from the nobles to
the people.' Scotland, like England, was achieving
national consciousness with the progress of its people
in wealth and education ; and this new national feeling
was trying to find a voice and clamouring to be heard.
Parliament did not and could not respond : some
other organ had to be provided, some other vehicle and
outlet for public opinion. It was found in the Assembly
190 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
of the Presbyterian Church ; it is there, and not in what
has been called ' the blighted and stunted conclave of
the three Estates/ that you hear the voice of Scotland
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There you
have the secret of the strength of the Church in Scot-
land. The Church had reformed itself in spite of the
State : it had not been reformed by the State in spite
of itself; the reformer in Scotland is a minister of
religion and not a minister of State, a John Knox
and not a Thomas Cromwell. The Reformation was
adopted by the Church in Scotland as a matter of faith
and conviction, not one of convenience and submission
to the monarch. The wrath of the King might mean
death in Edinburgh as well as in London, but John
Knox never used that plea of Warham's. ' Here lies
one,' said the Regent Morton at Knox's grave, ' who
never feared the face of man ' ; and there was no hang-
dog look of defeat and a conscience ill at ease among
the new presbyters of Scotland. The Kirk could hold
up its head in a fashion impossible for ecclesiastics who
accepted Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary and Elizabeth
in turn as orthodox defenders of the faith, and who
did not know whether to call themselves Protestants
or Catholics. c Throughout all the troubles of that
anxious time,' a modern high Churchman has written
of a Tudor turncoat, * he remained unswerving in his
fidelity to the national religion.' The Vicar of Bray,
you may remember, was equally staunch to the national
religion. That sort of fidelity was rare in Scotland,
and the Church had the strength of its convictions and
the consciousness of the national support. It reaped
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 191
the reward of its boldness : it did not halt between two
opinions ; it directed the whirlwind and rode the storm
of religious revolution. The Reformation in Scotland
is the triumph of the Church ; and the Church is vastly
stronger after than before the change, because it made
itself the mouthpiece of the nation, and fulfilled a
function abandoned by the Parliament.
That is not the only, or, perhaps, the most essential
point. The great cause of the weakness of Convoca-
tion in England was its exclusively ecclesiastical
composition ; it was a conclave, in which the laity
had no part nor lot. The Kirk in Scotland avoided
that mistake ; its assemblies were not composed of
ministers alone. In the kirk-sessions of the parish,
in the presbyteries, in the General Assembly itself,
laymen sat side by side with ministers as deacons or
lay-elders. In the gatherings of the Kirk, from the
lowest to the highest grades, the Scottish layman
found a sphere of activity and self-government, which
was denied him in the Scottish Parliament.
Hence Scotland becomes theocratic and not Erastian.
The voice of the people sounds through an ecclesi-
astical, and not a secular, organ ; and every popular
movement in Scotland takes an ecclesiastical colour.
Is a popular protest to be made? It does not take
the form of a Grand Remonstrance or a Petition of
Right, but of a National League and Covenant. Is
a tyrant to be murdered ? The victim will be an
Archbishop Sharp and not a Duke of Buckingham.
Are guarantees to be extracted from a King?
Charles II. will have to sign the Covenant in Scotland,
192 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
while William ill. accepts the Declaration of Right
in England. Instead of a Speaker being held in his
chair in a House of Commons at Westminster, a stool
will be hurled at a preacher in St. Giles', Edinburgh.
Scotland calls its civil wars the first and second
Bishops' Wars ; its revolts are Covenanting raids, and
even its generals are sometimes preachers : it was
they who appealed to the God of Battles at Dunbar
and ruined the campaign.
The real Parliament of Scotland is the Congrega-
tion, and its real platform is the pulpit. Scotland is
more anxious for the freedom of the pulpit than for
privilege of Parliament. While Peter and Paul Went-
worth were fighting for freedom of speech in the
House of Commons, Andrew Melville was claiming
in 1584 that a seditious harangue was privileged
because it had been delivered from the pulpit ; and
in 1596 the ministers laid down the principle that in
the pulpit they were free to say what they pleased.
Privilege was needed to combat the divine right of
kings just as much in Scotland as south of the
Border ; for James vi.'s pretensions were as high as
those of James I., and he was less controlled by the
Roman law of Scotland than by the common law
of England, Parliament in Scotland was unequally
matched with the King, and Scottish servility was
concentrated in the three Estates. Divine right of
kings is opposed in Scotland, not by common law and
Parliamentary privilege, but by divine right of the
Church. The opponents of the Crown are not Parlia-
mentarians like Pym or common lawyers like Coke,
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 193
but Presbyterian ministers like Melville and John
Knox.
And here we come across one of the singularities
of the Scottish Reformation. While the Scottish
Church assimilated Calvinistic dogma and adopted
the extremest possible antipathy to Roman ritual
and doctrine, it took up, in its relations with the
State, the identical position which the Papacy had
assumed from the eleventh century onwards. Melville
talks of the two kingdoms, Church and State, in
language which might have been borrowed from
Hildebrand : the Church was a visible kingdom, the
rival if not the superior of the State. Another minister
threatens James with the fate of Jeroboam, just as
popes threatened kings with the fate of Nero, Senna-
cherib, and any other monarch who happened to have
come to an evil end. Melville told James to his face
that he was but ' God's silly vassal.' Kings might
be deposed for their sins by the people. ' Cardinal
Bellarmine and Calvin,' says Filmer, * both look asquint
this way ' ; and one Scottish minister took it upon
himself to excommunicate Charles II. by his own
authority. The second Book of Discipline asserted
that the civil magistrate ought to 'hear and obey'
the voice of the minister ; the Church claimed the
right of inflicting penalties and of demanding that
the State should carry them out ; just as in medieval
times the ecclesiastical courts had condemned men to
the fire and handed them over to the secular arm to
be burnt. ' New Presbyter,' says Milton, ' is but old
priest writ large/
N
194 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
This is the fundamental antagonism between Eng-
land and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Against this theory of dual control of
Church and State, against these claims to a coercive
jurisdiction exercised by the clergy, the English
Reformation was a protest. The men who supported
Henry vill. had no idea of toleration, and no hatred
of persecution in itself; but they wanted the persecu-
tion done by the State and not by the Church, and
they would tolerate no divided authority, no organisa-
tion competing with the State for men's allegiance.
On this issue the Pope and Calvin were at one against
Luther, Erastus, and Cranmer, not to speak of Machia-
velli, Filmer, and Hobbes ; and to this antagonism
between Protestants is largely due the success of the
Counter Reformation. That is why we find Lutherans
preferring to fight for Catholics in France against
Calvinist Huguenots ; it is why Presbyterian and In-
dependent fight one another at Dunbar and Worcester.
From this point of view, the Reformation in Scotland
was a reaction to . medieval ideas against the modern
conception of the State. It was not permanent, and
even the Papacy has implicitly abandoned its medieval
position. The Pope no longer tries to deprive heretics
of their thrones ; he merely defines the faith. From
being lord of lords he has become merely a teacher
of teachers. The Church has ceased to trespass on
secular domains, and has retired for the most part into
its more proper spiritual sphere. So, too, Presbyterian
ministers do not as a rule resort to excommunica-
tion, nor expect the State to execute their judgments.
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 195
But, while these pretensions lasted, they caused much
friction between the sister-kingdoms, which might have
been avoided had Scotland found a secular voice in her
Parliament of the sixteenth century.
On the other hand there is something to be said.
However highly we estimate the courage and tenacity
of the English Parliament in resisting the divine right
of kings, it may be doubted whether the Kirk was not
a more stubborn obstacle in the path of the Stuarts ;
and it is difficult to see how that divine right could
have been overthrown in England in the seventeenth
century without the help of the Scots and their divine
right of the Church. Charles l.'s eleven years' tyranny
might have gone on indefinitely, but for the need of
money to maintain an army against the Scots. The
financial expedients of Noy and his colleagues sufficed
for the King's ordinary needs, and it was the Scots
who compelled him to summon the Short and then the
Long Parliament. The Scottish Kirk had struck
before the English Parliament, and divine right re-
belled before the common law.
Even in England itself the backbone of resistance to
the Stuarts was ecclesiastical. Laud was brought to
the block as well as Strafford and Charles i. ; and
Parliament would not have been either so determined
or so ferocious, had it not also been Puritan and
Presbyterian. The old priest writ large was not con-
fined to Scotland ; his voice was heard in the mouth
of Cartwright, Travers, and Wilcox, though their note
is not so clear as that of Knox and Melville. They
were Puritan rather than Presbyterian ; and, in spite
196 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
of their theological views, they could not escape the
national atmosphere. Parliament was more to them
than it was to the Scots, and the divine right of the
Church was less. They were ready enough to appeal
to Parliament to establish their religion, and said more
about the Popery of the Church than about its in-
dependence. The reason was that they had expecta-
tions from Parliament, which Knox and Melville had
not from the Scottish Estates. The English Parliament
reflected national sentiment in all its forms, and thus
it sometimes spoke in ecclesiastical tones. English
Puritan ministers had more to hope from Parliament
than from the Crown, or from the Bishops and Con-
vocation ; and so, although ecclesiastics themselves,
they appealed to the lay, and not to the ecclesiastical
assembly. Hence it was that Puritanism in England
did not foster theocracy, as it did in Scotland, and
England is less theocratic than Scotland, even when
Puritanism is dominant in both.
Nevertheless, the English Presbyterians were more
theocratic than the mass of Englishmen liked, and it
was their efforts to impose a Presbyterian system upon
England which divided the Roundhead party, led to
the military rule of Cromwell, and finally to the
Restoration of Charles II. From the first, indeed,
there were opponents of the Crown and the Bishops
who were not Presbyterians. Most of these were
Independents or Congregationalists, who believed that
the original ecclesia or church was the congregation,
and that each congregation had the right to manage
its own affairs without interference from the State,
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 197
from bishops, or from synods. The names of their
leaders, such as Cromwell and Milton, are familiar
household words, and the part they played in history
is known to all. But there were other enemies of the
Anglican Church, as represented by Laud, whose
hostility arose, not so much from theological antipathy,
as from dislike of the political pretensions of the pre-
lates: and these men were hostile to ecclesiastical
claims from whatever quarter they proceeded. They
detested the new presbyter just as much as they
did the old priest, and their main concern was to
uphold the supremacy of State over Church, whether
the Church was Catholic or Protestant, Anglican
or Presbyterian. They were Erastians, pure and
simple.
Of these men the chief was the great lawyer, Selden,
who had made a sensation and fame early in his career
by writing a book on tithes, in which he attacked the
divine origin of that institution, and denied the divine
right of the clergy to receive them. For even after the
Reformation, the Church claimed a divine right, though
it took a financial form. This was not the only con-
tention which brought Selden into collision with the
Anglican Church. ' All is as the state pleases/ he says
in his Table Talk. And again, ' every law is a contract
between the king and the people, and therefore to be
kept.' Such principles were destructive of the claims
to jus divinum alike of kings, bishops, and presbyters ;
and they were as distasteful to the Scottish divines
at the Westminster Assembly as they had been to
Charles I. and Archbishop Laud. During those
198 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
famous discussions, Selden employed his immense
learning to humble, as Fuller says, the jure-divinoship
of Presbytery ; but a rift in the Puritan union of hearts
had appeared before the Westminster Assembly met.
When Pym threw the Scottish sword into the balance
between King and Parliament, the Scots demanded, as
the price of their alliance, that there should be a
religious covenant between the two nations as well as
a civil league ; and they wanted to pledge the English
Parliament to a remodelling of the Anglican Church
1 according to the example of the best-reformed
churches/ that is to say, their own. But, through
the skill of Sir Henry Vane the younger, there was
added the clause ' and the Word of God.' The Scots
could not very well resist the addition of this clause,
for that would be to admit that their own Church was
not according to the Word of God ; at the same time,
its adoption opened the door for Independency, and,
indeed, for any other form of Christian church, for no
one would admit that his own particular church was not
according to the Word of God. The Scots, doubtless,
trusted to the influence of their military and political
strength to make their interpretation prevail ; and,
assuredly, it would have done so, had it not been for
the unforeseen development of Cromwell's Ironsides ;
and the issue, which had been debated at the West-
minster Assembly, was fought out at Dunbar and
Worcester.
Dunbar was the death-blow to the theocratic and
presbyterian system. The Covenanters had done
everything which could, according to their principles,
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 199
ensure success. They had sought to purge their army
of every taint which might bring down the wrath of
Heaven upon the chosen people of God ; Charles II.
had been forced to declare that he was * deeply
humbled and afflicted in spirit before God because of
his father's opposition to the work of God.' Even so,
he was kept at a distance from the army, lest his
presence involve it in the condemnation of Achan.
With the same object a commission was appointed to
weed out from the army every soldier who did not come
up to the requisite standard of godliness. Some four
thousand troops were thus cashiered on the eve of
the battle of Dunbar, and, in the words of a royalist
historian, the army was left to ' ministers' sons, clerks,
and such other sanctified creatures, who hardly ever
saw or heard of any sword but that of the Spirit.' This
army made texts do duty for tactics ; Leslie was over-
ruled, and Cromwell snatched victory out of the
tightest corner he ever was in. Before the campaign
had opened, Cromwell besought the divines to think it
possible that they were mistaken, and Dunbar must
have caused many searchings of heart. From it may
perhaps be dated the decline of the Covenanting spirit
in Scotland. The ministers, it is true, continued to
strive as before, and the Covenanters split into two
factions, the Remonstrants and the Engagers, one
attributing their failure to their connection with a
godless king, the other ascribing it to the folly of the
zealots. But this distraction only weakened the Kirk,
and facilitated the work of Cromwell's government in
Scotland.
200 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
It would be absurd to pretend that Scotland was
content with the English domination ; but that rule
gave it a period of prosperity, sound administration,
and peace, such as Scotland had not known before. In
particular, it was not a persecuting government itself,
and to some extent it prevented persecution by others.
Fanaticism was thus deprived of sustenance, and
materially abated. A secular spirit of compromise
begins to appear, and to soften the rancour of
theological debate ; and it was this spirit of com-
promise which alone could make possible any real
union by consent between the English and the Scottish
peoples. The union effected under the Commonwealth
and Protectorate lacked this essential condition of
consent ; the Scots considered the thirty members
allotted them on the basis of wealth and population
to be a ridiculously inadequate recognition of their
moral and intellectual importance. These members
were generally the nominees of the government, and
the legality of their position was challenged on that
score. They were, said one member, a wooden leg tied
to a natural body, and that kind of grafting is not, as
a rule, successful.
The Restoration dissolved this union, undid all the
work of the last ten years, deprived Scotland of the
benefit of the free trade enjoyed with England under
Cromwell's union, exposed her to the operation of the
Navigation Laws, and plunged her back again into the
political and religious bitterness which the tolerant
rule of Cromwell had to some extent allayed. When
Monck, amid almost universal acclamation, set out
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 201
to cross the Tweed and restore the Stuarts, he .opened
the most pitiful chapter in the whole of Scotland's
history. The revival of the theories of divine right of
kings renewed the necessity for a divine right of
presbytery to combat them ; and the restoration of
persecution as the policy of the government inevitably
produced a recrudescence of fanaticism. Hence we
get the execution of Argyle, the Pentland rising, the
excommunication of Charles II. by Craig, the murder
of Archbishop Sharp, the battle of Bothwell Brig, and
the martyrdom of Margaret Wilson and scores of
others. The Parliament of Scotland, as of yore, is
no bulwark against the encroachments of the Crown,
and the task of saving Scotland's liberties is left
once more to the stubborn temper of the Kirk, which,
like other churches, could stand any test except that
of prosperity. But the secular spirit had affected even
the Kirk ; its resistance to Charles II. and Lauderdale
is less national, less unanimous than it had been to
Charles I. and Laud. It is more sectional, more
irresponsible ; while some resort to murder and ill-
prepared revolts, others seek favour with the Court.
The Cameronians are a section, the Covenanters of
1638 were a nation. Part of this sectionalism was
due to the attraction which the Anglican Church
exercised over the higher faction of the Scottish
clergy, the majority of whom had become Episco-
palian by 1688, part to the effects of Charles ll.'s
Declarations of Indulgence, but a great deal to a
growing immersion in commercial pursuits, which
weakened the theological bond of union.
202 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
One illustration of the fanaticism of this period
has generally been neglected, for obvious reasons, by
Presbyterian historians ; and that is the belief in,
and persecution of, witchcraft. This superstition
seems to have been a particular weakness of extreme
Protestants, and we hear far more of it after the
Reformation than we do in the Middle Ages. It
was not, of course, unknown before the sixteenth
century; Charlemagne had legislated against it, and
the Inquisition had been actively employed against
witchcraft in the fifteenth century. But it was not
until 1563 that the penalty of death was first pre-
scribed for this offence in Scotland. This remained
the law until 1736, and it was during the period
between the Restoration and the Revolution that
the fury against witches reached its height. In the
year 1662 alone no fewer than one hundred and
twenty women were burnt as witches in Scotland,
and the total number of victims to this barbarous
delusion must be reckoned by thousands and not
by hundreds. Scotland was exceptional in this re-
spect, but only in degree, for in England witches
were burnt as late as the eighteenth century, and at
Salem, in Massachusetts, there was an appalling out-
burst of fanaticism against witches in 1692, in which
several eminent and esteemed Puritan divines were
disgracefully involved. But, as witchcraft has not
yet become a respectable creed, these victims of
religious persecution have not been honoured with
a martyrologist, and occupy but little space in the
voluminous pages of ecclesiastical history.
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 203
This recrudescence of the theological spirit in
Scotland threatened to revive the antagonism between
the two kingdoms, and they were only bound together
by a common resistance to a despotic government.
Not that England herself was without her theological
disputes. A German historian carries on his account
of the period of the Reformation in England down
to 1688; and there is much to be said for the view
that the predominant interest in English politics is
religious throughout the seventeenth century, and that
it is not until the Revolution that the Reformation
has worked out its full effect. Not until 1688 are
Roman Catholics debarred from the English throne,
and, although some High Churchmen would have us
believe that the English Church was Protestant before
the Reformation, and Catholic after it, the Church
was really more Protestant during the eighteenth
century than at any other period of its existence.
However that may be, there is no denying the power
of religious feeling in the reign of Charles II. The
so-called Clarendon Code, the Test Act, the rabid
fury of Titus Oates's Plot, are ample proof. Anglican
fanaticism rules the roost under Clarendon, Protestant
fanaticism under Shaftesbury, and Roman Catholic
fanaticism under James II. One of the two great
aims of Charles II. was religious ; he wanted to make
himself an absolute monarch, but he also wanted to
re-introduce the Roman Catholic religion ; and it was
not until he had realised the impossibility of this
second object, and abandoned it, that he succeeded
in making himself absolute for the last four years of
204 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
his reign. Had not James II. been a more zealous
Romanist, as well as a more stupid man, and had
he not tried to make England Roman Catholic, as
well as to make himself absolute, he might have
made permanent the temporary success of Charles n.
Yet there was, despite this religious atmosphere,
a difference between the England and the Scotland
of the Restoration. Charles II. and Shaftesbury do
not strike one at first sight as natural leaders of
religion. They may have been leaders of religious
parties, but that, after all, is another matter. And,
even if leaders of religious parties, they were politicians
first and sober leaders of religion last. Shaftesbury
himself, * a daring pilot in extremity/ as Dryden
calls him, was as inferior in moral character to Pym
as Charles n. was to Charles I. The pagan spirit
of the Restoration pervaded politics and religion, and
in the religious passions of the time there was a good
deal more passion than there was religion. The con-
tention is not about doctrine or theology, but about
the political power and privileges to be enjoyed by
the members of the various churches. The Puritans
are not hated because they refuse to subscribe the
Thirty-nine Articles, but because they had cut ofT
the head of a King, and had closed the theatres.
Romanists are not feared because they believe in
Transubstantiation, but because they were thought to
be in league with Louis xiv. The motive was, in
fact, largely, if not mainly, political ; and the party
leaders use religious passions for political purposes.
James II. was enthusiastically welcomed on his acces-
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 205
sion, in spite of the fact that every one knew that
he was a Roman Catholic ; indeed, his staunchness
to his faith was reckoned one of the points in his
favour. It was not until he began to dispense with
the laws and with Parliament, and to show an in-
clination to set up a military despotism, that the
nation began to distrust him. The Revolution, while
its religious aspect looks back to the past and con-
summates the Reformation, has also its political aspect,
which looks forward to the future and points towards
the Reform Bill. It rang out the old religion, but it
also rang in the new politics. The curtain came down
upon the Reformation, but it rose upon Reform, and
a secular, latitudinarian spirit takes the place of the
old theological passion.
A similar transformation was coming over Scotland,
though it was not by any means so marked. Ever since
the battle of Dunbar, religious interests had really been
declining in Scotland ; and the revived importance of
them after the Restoration was a fictitious importance
due to the misgovernment of the Stuarts. This becomes
evident upon the accession of William III. : he was
neither an Englishman nor a Scot ; coming from abroad,
he looked at both countries from a more detached point
of view, just as an Englishman sent out to govern India
takes a more comprehensive and impartial view of Indian
politics than if he had been born a Mahratta, a Sikh,
or a Bengali. William was anxious for the main-
tenance of the existing episcopal organisation of the
Church in Scotland, but so liberalised as to compre-
hend all the Presbyterians. This scheme of compre-
206 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
hension broke down through the unexpected fidelity
of the Scottish Episcopalians to James n., and
Presbyterianism became the State religion. But the
settlement was very different from that of 1647. The
Covenants were not renewed : indeed an Act of 1662,
which condemned them as unlawful, was allowed to
remain in force. Excommunication was deprived of
its civil penalties, and the oath of allegiance was
adopted, in lieu of all religious tests, as the passport
to political office. The majority of Scotsmen were,
in fact, turning away from theological disputes, and
concentrating their interests on that expansion of
Scottish commerce which is a marked feature of
Scottish history during the latter part of the seven-
teenth century. The prominent Scotsmen of the
reign of William are no longer Presbyterian divines,
but financiers, like William Paterson, who founded the
Bank of England, or John Law, who sought to revolu-
tionise the French finance. The events which make a
stir are not covenants, but the Darien scheme and the
Massacre of Glencoe.
This decline of the theological spirit smoothed the
path to Union in 1707. Scotland's consent was largely
bought by the prospect of free trade with England, a
motive which would not have appealed to a nation
entirely immersed in religion and theology. The same
inducement had failed to work throughout the seven-
teenth century, and it was only effective now because
the spread of latitudinarianism had undermined the
strength of theological antipathies. As it was, Presby-
terian Scots accepted union with an Episcopal country,
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
207
and sat cheek by jowl with Anglicans at Westminster,
braving the contagion of prelatical poison. Anglicans
connived at the establishment of heresy as a State
religion across the Border. The old priest, not writ so
large as before, and the new presbyter, looking some-
what small, lay down together, and Walpole led them
in the paths of peace.
208 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
IX
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS
OF the many interesting and important questions
connected with the history of the Commonwealth and
Protectorate, none are of more permanent significance
than the various expedients to which recourse was had
to solve the constitutional problems created by the
destruction of the monarchy, the dissolution of the
House of Lords, and the undisguised predominance
of the army. These phenomena were revolutionary
enough, but perhaps they were not really so radical as
the attempts to give England a written, rigid con-
stitution, embodying certain fixed and fundamental
principles which should be unchangeable even by the
Legislature itself. For the great characteristic of the
British Constitution, which distinguishes it from all
foreign constitutions, is that it is not and never has
been, except for temporary aberrations, a written, or
a rigid constitution, or one in which there was any
fundamental law.
These phrases, perhaps, require some explanation,
especially as they represent the principles upon which
some political philosophers would classify and dis-
tinguish modern constitutions. The old classification
derived from Plato and Aristotle into monarchy, aris-
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 209
tocracy, and democracy, and the several perversions of
these forms, has long ceased to have any practical
application to modern conditions, although it still
retains its place in text-books as the starting-point of
all political wisdom ; and political writers have long
been casting about for some more satisfactory method
of classification. What, then, is meant by saying that
a constitution is written or unwritten ? When a great
French political philosopher, De Tocqueville, was
asked about the English Constitution, he said, ' Elle
n'existe point.' It does not exist, in fact, in the same
sense that the French or Belgian constitution exists ; for
these are definite, written documents. Most educated
men in France have a copy of the French Constitution
on their bookshelves, and can point to it and say, * That
is the French Constitution.' Now that is not possible
for an Englishman : there is no one document, or series
of documents, called the British Constitution. For him
it is a much more complex thing, and sometimes he
finds himself in the law-courts before he finds out
what the British Constitution is : and even the mere
repetition of the words is, I believe, sometimes used
as a test of sobriety. The British Constitution is a
miscellaneous, uncollected, undigested mass of statutes,
legal decisions, and vague understandings or mis-
understandings, some of which have never been put
down in writing. No book contains them all ; and
there is nothing — not even the House of Lords — to
which we can point and say, * This is the British Con-
stitution.' That is what De Tocqueville meant when
he said that the British Constitution did not exist ;
O
210 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
and that is what we mean when we say that the
British Constitution is unwritten. That phrase does
not, of course, imply that no parts of it are written ;
for Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Acts, and the
Bill of Rights are all parts of the British Constitution ;
but there is no one document which can be described
as such.
Now, what do we mean when we say that the British
Constitution is not rigid but flexible ? We mean this :
that no part of the Constitution is unalterable by
the ordinary legislative methods. Parliament could
at any time repeal the Habeas Corpus Acts, the Bill
of Rights, and even Magna Carta itself; it could
prolong its own existence indefinitely by repealing
the Septennial Act ; it could abolish trial by jury,
and set up a Star Chamber or the Inquisition, and
none of these things would be illegal. There is, in
fact, nothing fundamental in the British Constitu-
tion ; for although we loosely talk of things being
fundamental which are merely more important in
our eyes than other things, the word properly means
things which cannot be altered by the ordinary legis-
lative machinery. But in the French, or in the
American Constitution, there are many things which
cannot be altered by the French or American Legis-
latures : both are bound and limited by the powers
conferred upon them by the original, written Con-
stitution. That Constitution is beyond the reach of the
legislative bodies, and can only be touched by calling
into play a special and cumbrous constitutional
machinery. The reason for this in America is, that
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 211
the framers of the Constitution were forced to safeguard
the interests of the individual States against the possible
encroachments of the Federal authority, and conse-
quently they embodied in the Constitution a number
of prohibitions and limitations on the powers of the
Legislature, and they entrusted the Supreme Court of
Judicature with the duty of seeing that these limitations
were observed. Any law passed by Congress may be
brought before the Supreme Court, and its legality
contested. If the Supreme Court decides that the
enactment contravenes any of the limits imposed by
the Constitution, that enactment becomes ipso facto
void. Thus, a few years ago, Congress found that it
had no power to impose an income-tax upon the
American people ; and one of the great difficulties in
dealing with the Trusts is, that the law of Association
is as much a matter for the individual States as for the
Federal authority, and Congress cannot dictate the
conditions upon which individual States shall permit
associations and combines to be formed within their
borders. So, in the same way, the American Constitu-
tion rigidly defines the limits between the Legislature,
the Executive, and the Judicature. No judge in
America can be removed by an address of Congress,
as he can in England by an address of both Houses
of Parliament. No vote of censure by the Senate
or the House of Representatives can terminate, or even
shorten, the existence of an American administration.
On the other hand, the President cannot dissolve the
Legislature one hour before its appointed time ; he
cannot appeal from a hostile Congress to a friendly
212 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
country. In England the Prime Minister can, if he
likes, turn out the House of Commons, and the House
of Commons can, if it likes, turn out the Prime
Minister. In America, neither can remove the other ;
they can only annoy one another, and impede one
another's action until the period pre-ordained by the
Constitution has elapsed. The whole Constitution is
fixed and rigid, and consequently there is a good deal
of friction.
There is nothing corresponding to all this in the
English Constitution, where all the more important
parts of the Constitution are flexible; and, perhaps,
the greatest advantage of this flexibility is that it has
permitted the Constitution to be shaped and moulded
by those who have had to work the machine, without
the necessity of appealing for approval to the ignorant
and prejudiced. Let me take the Prime Minister as
an example. I do not, of course, refer to any par-
ticular Prime Minister, but to the species. The Prime
Minister is the pivot of the whole constitutional sys-
tem ; yet until the other day he was unknown to the
written law of the Constitution : no Act of Parliament
has ever been passed to create, to regulate, or to
modify his office or his functions. He does not occur
in the Statute Book, he is unknown in the courts of
law. In fact, he has grown, and not been made. It
would not have been possible to make him by Act
of Parliament ; for the prejudice against such an office
throughout the eighteenth century was so great that
no House of Commons, and probably no House of
Lords, would ever have passed the bill. Walpole,
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 213
who was a Prime Minister if ever there was one, had
to repudiate the title ; but a Prime Minister was felt
to be necessary by those who had to govern England ;
and so, gradually, imperceptibly, and in spite of the
prejudices of the Houses of Parliament, the office of
Prime Minister was evolved, thanks to the flexible
and unwritten character of our Constitution. If the
practice of writing Constitutions, set by the Common-
wealth and Protectorate, had been followed, we should
never have had a Prime Minister at all.
So it is with the Cabinet ; that body, which rules the
Empire, is as unknown to the written law of the Con-
stitution as the Prime Minister. It, too, has grown
without the help of legislation. It is an organic
growth and not a manufactured article. Therefore
it has been able to adapt itself to the changing cir-
cumstances of its being silently and gradually, without
the intervention of the written law. Nor, again, would
it have been possible to create the Cabinet by statu-
tory enactment ; for Parliament was bitterly jealous
of all such bodies. It even did its best to make a
Cabinet permanently impossible by prohibiting all
holders of paid offices under the Crown from sitting
in the House of Commons, a prohibition which still
survives in the obligation on ministers to seek re-
election on their appointment to their office. We may
be sure that Parliament in such a frame of mind would
never have passed an act creating the modern Cabinet.
So the Cabinet, again, was left for the statesmen of
the eighteenth century to work out by a slow and
gradual evolution. Similarly, the whole process of the
214 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
modification of the powers and position of the House
of Lords has been achieved without legislation. No
statute has deprived the Upper House of the power
of amending or rejecting money-bills sent up by the
House of Commons; no Act prohibits it from rejecting
as often as it likes measures approved by the constitu-
encies. Again, no statute requires a Government to
resign when it has forfeited the confidence of the
majority of the House of Commons ; no direct law
enjoins the summons of Parliament every year ; and
there would be nothing illegal in the disbandment of all
the military and naval forces of the Crown. All these
things are left to the operation of public opinion, or of
what are called the conventions of the Constitution.
These conventions are the most characteristic and
perhaps the most important parts of the Constitution ;
they are simply understandings, upon which statesmen
may be trusted to act, but which are not written, and
could not be enforced in any court of law. They are
as flexible as usage cares to make them, and they are
always being formed and modified day by day. The
British Constitution is thus a living organism, ever
adapting itself to the changing needs of time, and ever
avoiding that friction which a rigid Constitution in-
evitably involves. For you cannot keep things as
they are; and if your Constitution is based on the
assumption that they will not change, it is bound
sooner or later to prove inadequate or ineffective. The
most stable Constitution is that which ensures the
readiest adaptation to the change of circumstances.
This somewhat lengthy preface has seemed advis-
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 215
able in order to bring out the importance of the
attempts which were made during the Commonwealth
and Protectorate to divert the stream of English con-
stitutional development, and to provide England with
a written, rigid Constitution. It may also be worth
remarking that the character of the American Consti-
tution has been attributed to conscious and deliberate
imitation of these Puritan and Republican constitu-
tions of seventeenth-century England ; though other
influences must also be taken into account. For one
thing, the American colonists had always lived under
a system of written, rigid constitutions, namely the
charters by which the various colonies had been
founded. Secondly, the fact that the new State was
bound to be a federation compelled the authors of the
Constitution to define in a written document the rela-
tions between the individual States and the central
power. Thirdly, the Americans had obviously been
frightened by Hobbes's doctrine of sovereignty. They
saw George III. in every possible sovereign ; and they
came to the conclusion that this sovereignty was much
too dangerous a thing to be left at large. Conse-
quently, they put it under lock and key, or rather a
triple lock and triple keys. And they gave one key to
the Executive, one to the Legislature, and one to the
Supreme Court ; and it is only with the connivance of
these three that sovereignty can be let loose in the
United States. Rousseau said that the English were
free only once in seven years ; and it is true that only
at a general election do the constituencies exercise
political sovereignty. But only about once in a genera-
216 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
tion does the American people assert its mastery over
the Constitution, which at all other times controls and
limits its action.
Now, why was it during the Commonwealth and
Protectorate that attempts were made to tie up the
English Constitution in a somewhat similar manner?
The answer will be found in the circumstance that the
dominant party wanted to place certain political prin-
ciples out of the reach of the ordinary Legislature,
which was pretty certain to be hostile to those prin-
ciples. And this arose from the logical quandary in
which the nation was landed by the result of the Civil
War. The whole struggle from 1603-1649 had centred
round the question whether the Executive or the
Legislature, Parliament or the Crown, was to be the
supreme authority in the State. In that contest the
Crown was defeated, but Parliament did not reap the
fruits of victory ; in fact it had not won the victory.
Had Parliament been left to its own genius and to its
own resources, the victor would have been the King.
It was Cromwell and the army which had saved Eng-
land from a Stuart despotism ; and Cromwell and the
army were resolved to have a voice and a share in the
distribution of the spoils. But both soon found them-
selves as much out of sympathy with the majority of
the House of Commons as Charles I. had ever been.
They were equally out of sympathy with the mass of
the nation ; the appeal to arms had meant, as it always
does, the triumph of military efficiency over political
principle : success in the barbarous arbitrament of war
has no relevance to the validity of civil argument, and
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 217
the victor in a war is just as likely to be wrong as
right, and almost certain to be despotic. In this case
neither Cromwell nor the army had much sympathy
with the principles for which Parliament had con-
tended. Cromwell believed in a strong executive, at
least so long as he controlled it ; and, indeed, the
possession of power makes even the most radical
anxious to avoid at least one change, just as being in
opposition converts the most conservative to the neces-
sity of one political alteration. Cromwell was not so
purely an opportunist as this ; his constitutional ideas
were not so very far removed from those of the Stuarts.
He had objected to the things they did, rather than to
the way they did them, and he was convinced that an
executive, to be strong, must have a wide discretion.
He had little patience with the talking-shop at West-
minster ; that was why he appealed so strongly to
Carlyle, who once said to Lord Wolseley that he hoped
some day to see him treat the House of Commons as
Cromwell did the Rump. There is, however, no occa-
sion to denounce him as the destroyer of a constitu-
tional regime ; for, from that point of view, there was
little to choose between him and Parliament. Both
were bent on ruling in defiance of the wishes of the
majority of the people ; and it was the determination
of the Rump to prolong its own existence by its own
illegal fiat which provoked its violent expulsion by
Cromwell's troops. So, too, there is an answer to the
common charge against Cromwell that he ruled by the
sword ; and that is, that there was nothing left to rule
by, other than the sword.
2i8 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
The crux of the situation was the fact that govern-
ment - by consent was for the moment out of the
question. It was not in human nature for the
victors to give up the spoils of victory, and quietly
submit to be ruled by the majority they had con-
quered. Therefore a despotism was inevitable, and,
Englishmen being averse from naked despotism, the
question was how to clothe it with a decent constitu-
tional garb. That was the real, though perhaps un-
conscious, motive of the rigid, written constitutions of
the Commonwealth and Protectorate. They were so
many efforts to fix a legal wig upon the point of the
soldier's sword. The covering was somewhat scanty,
and the effect was not all that might have been desired.
The sword remained too obviously the important part
of the concern, the wig was difficult to adjust, it was
always falling off, and the two things did not really
harmonise.
The all-important thing, then, was to secure the
government, which the army had set up, against
attack from the Parliament, which this government
desired to create as a cloak for its military nature.
The powers of Parliament must, then, be limited and
defined ; certain things must be placed beyond its
reach. Now, Parliament could not be trusted to do
this definition itself ; it could not be expected to pass
two self-denying ordinances in one generation, more
especially as the first had led to that very supremacy
of the sword which it now so much resented. So
there must be a bold assumption of fundamental law
existing by its own authority, and circumscribing and
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 219
defining the legislative authority of Parliament. You
may remember that law, which is originally no more
than custom, is afterwards regarded as a sort of
treasury of Divine or natural wisdom which human
rulers may apply to the countries over which they
rule ; and only in the latest stages of the development
of human thought is it a command of the State. The
Fundamental Law of Cromwell and the army seems to
belong to the second of these stages, and they regarded
themselves as more or less divinely commissioned to
employ force in the application of this law.
Cromwell himself described the doctrine of Funda-
mental Law in a speech to the Parliament of 1654. ' In
every government,' he said, ' there must be somewhat
fundamental, somewhat like a Magna Carta, that
should be standing and be unalterable. Some things
are fundamentals, they may not be parted with ; but
will, I trust, be delivered over to posterity as being the
fruits of our blood and travail. The Government by
a Single Person and a Parliament is a fundamental.
. . . That Parliaments should not make themselves
perpetual is a fundamental. . . . Again, is not liberty
of conscience in religion a fundamental ? So long as
there is liberty of conscience for the Supreme Magi-
strate to exercise his conscience in erecting what form
of church-government he is satisfied he should set up,
why should he not give it (the like liberty) to others?
Liberty of conscience is a natural right ; and he, that
would have it, ought to give it, having himself liberty
to settle what he likes for the public. . . . The
magistrate hath his supremacy, and he may settle
220 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Religion, that is church-government, according to his
conscience. . . . This, I say, is fundamental. It ought
to be so. It is for us and the generations to come. . . .
Another fundamental, which I had forgotten, is the
Militia. That is judged a fundamental, if anything be
so. ... What signifies a provision against perpetuating
of Parliaments, if this power of the Militia be solely in
them"} . . . And if this one thing be placed in one
party, that one, be it Parliament, be it Supreme
Governor, they or he hath power to make what they
please of all the rest. Therefore ... it should be so
equally placed that no one person, neither in Parlia-
ment nor out of Parliament, should have the power of
ordering it.'
These fundamentals of Cromwell anticipate much
of later English history, and Dr. Gardiner speaks
enthusiastically of his ' power of seeing into the heart
of a situation' ; for, 'whilst the Instrument of Govern-
ment, with its many artificial devices for stemming the
tide of Parliamentary supremacy, perished without
leaving its mark on the Constitution, his four funda-
mentals have been accepted by the nation, and are
at this day as firmly rooted in its conscience as
Parliamentary supremacy itself.' Some qualification
seems necessary before we can accept this as a literal
statement of the fact. Government by a single person
and a Parliament is not accepted as a fundamental in
the sense in which Cromwell meant it, for the single
person does not really govern in the sense that
Cromwell governed. He may not ' settle religion, that
is church-government, according to his conscience.'
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 221
Indeed, he is prohibited by Act of Parliament from
indulging his conscience to such an extent, at any rate,
as to become a Roman Catholic. The same interpre-
tation has to be put on Cromwell's * magistrate ' as
upon Hobbes's sovereign to make them applicable to
latter-day conditions ; they must both be given a
composite and not an individual personality ; the
king must be the king in Parliament, and so must be
the magistrate. Even then, as a matter of practical
politics, he cannot settle religion according to his
conscience.
Moreover, these things, so far as they are accepted
to-day, are accepted as fundamental ideas rather than
as fundamental laws. It is quite true that Crom-
well's conception of the functions and objects of the
State is singularly modern, but his conception of the
methods, by which those objects were to be achieved,
has never been adopted since his time. Even Magna
Carta, which Cromwell quoted as a fundamental, was
not really fundamental law, though the barons had
tried to make it such by legalising armed rebellion and
civil war if the king refused to carry out its provisions.
Fortunately they failed in their attempt to perpetuate
Magna Carta as fundamental law ; for it was really
a feudal document drawn up in the interests of the
barons and designed to protect their private jurisdic-
tions, privileges, and monopolies against the rule of
common-law. There would have been little liberty or
justice in England had the barons secured the privilege,
promised them in Magna Carta, of trying their depen-
dants for almost all offences in their own manorial
222 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
courts ; and there would have been little law and order
had they retained the right, also promised them in
Magna Carta, of settling their disputes by recourse
to trial by battle. The modern conception of Magna
Carta is, in fact, a myth invented in the seventeenth
century ; and the only serious use made of it in the
sixteenth was the attempt, by an appeal to it, to stop
the Parliament from legislating for the Church and to
perpetuate the Roman jurisdiction.
The whole conception of fundamental law was alien
to the spirit of the English Constitution, and the
attempt of Cromwell to make it fundamental was in
itself a revolution, the magnitude of which the Pro-
tector did not himself perceive. And it was not more
likely to prove palatable because it was dictated solely
by the interests of the ruling military faction and not
by the interests or desires of the nation as a whole.
Cromwell, conscious of this antagonism, was driven to
take up a position hardly distinguishable from that of
the Stuarts. 'Though some/ he says in his fourth
speech, ' may think it is a hard thing without Parlia-
mentary authority to raise money upon this nation;
yet I have another argument to the good people of
this nation . . . whether they prefer the having of
their will, though it be their destruction, rather than
comply with things of necessity?' He claimed the
right to levy money without the consent of Parliament,
he claimed the right of controlling the militia. Yet he
had voted for the Petition of Right, which prohibited
taxation without the consent of Parliament ; and in
1642 he had taken part in the struggle of the House of
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 223
Commons to deprive the king of the right to control
the militia, which he now claimed to exercise as
Protector.
But, in spite of the unfortunate circumstances which
attended the birth of these Cromwellian constitutions
and condemned them from the first to a short and
unhappy existence, there was much in their nature
which entitled them to a better fate. They were not
merely the expedients of an army embarrassed by
lack of constitutional clothing ; they were also great
measures of reform and constructive statesmanship.
The Instrument of Government, which was drawn up in
December 1653, contained in it two, if not three, Acts
of Union, a Franchise Act, an Act for the Redistribution
of Seats, an Act for the Settlement of the Revenue,
besides the establishment of the Protectorate and
Council of State, and the definition of the functions, the
duration and the powers of Parliament. The provisions
with respect to the office of Protector, the composition
of the Council of State, the revenue, and the machinery
for securing triennial sessions of Parliament may be
omitted, because they anticipated nothing of importance
in subsequent English history.
But it is important to remember that the Instrument
of Government was the most comprehensive Act of
Union in English history. Both Scotland and Ireland
were included at the same time: thirty members were
to represent Scotland, and thirty Ireland, in the
United Parliament. The numbers seem small com-
pared with the four hundred members allotted to the
predominant partner ; but, apparently, they were not
224 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
unfairly based upon a calculation of the respective
wealth and population of the three countries. Nor
were Scotland and Ireland the only spheres which
were now for the first time brought within the Parlia-
mentary system. Wales had received Parliamentary
representation at the hands of Henry VIII., who had
also extended the same boon to Cheshire, to Calais, and
to Berwick-upon-Tweed. But the County Palatine of
Durham and the Channel Islands still remained unre-
presented in the Parliament of England. Durham
was the last of those great medieval franchises which
had been guaranteed by Magna Carta, and long resisted
all efforts to incorporate them in the national system ;
it had its own courts of law and other regalia, or royal
rights, such as the right of coinage ; but the dangers
of the system in the case of Durham were mitigated
by the fact that the earl was also bishop, and could
not found a feudal dynasty. The Channel Islands
were originally part of the Norman duchy, and claim
to have conquered England rather than to have
been conquered by England. They had been left
to their own legislative devices, probably because
they were distant and their common-law was widely
different from that of England. In the sixteenth
century they were declared to be directly subject to
the Privy Council, but with the brief exception of the
Protectorate, they have never been subject to the
British Parliament. And even Cromwell did not in-
corporate that other outlying island, the Isle of Man,
of which the Earls of Derby were the sovereign lords.
The most important feature of the Instrument of
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 225
Government is its aspect as a Reform Bill, including
a redistribution of seats and a revision of the fran-
chise. The redistribution was on a drastic scale. We
often hear talk about the change which has converted
England from an agricultural into an urban community,
but the remark seems singularly inapplicable to
Parliamentary representation. In the Middle Ages the
county members numbered only seventy against nearly
three times that number of borough members. In the
Long Parliament of 1640 the disproportion was even
greater, and there were about four hundred and thirty
borough members to about a hundred county
members. Of course, we must remember that the
boroughs of those days were more agricultural than
they are at present, but even so, there seems to be a
striking inequality; the county of York, for instance,
only returned two shire-members, while the boroughs
in Yorkshire returned twenty-eight. This anomaly the
Instrument of Government now proceeded to remedy.
The borough-members were reduced from about
four hundred and thirty to one hundred and thirty-
nine, while the county-members were increased from
a hundred to two hundred and sixty-one. The total
number of English and Welsh representatives was
reduced from five hundred and thirty to four hundred.
This was the most sweeping change ever effected at
one blow in the history of Parliamentary representa-
tion. And it was accompanied by a regular slaughter
of rotten, or rather insignificant, boroughs ; for they did
not become really rotten until late in the eighteenth
century. The representatives of Cornish boroughs
P
226 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
sank from twenty-eight to four; Newport, Newtown,
and Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight lost their
members ; and the island, which had returned six
representatives to Parliament, had now to be content
with two. Old Sarum disappeared, Gatton, Gram-
pound, and a host of other hoary antiquities. On the
other hand, Yorkshire was divided into its three
Ridings for the purposes of Parliamentary representa-
tion ; and the West Riding was given six members,
and each of the other Ridings four. Essex was
allotted thirteen county members instead of two ;
Devon, Kent, and Somerset eleven each ; and Lincoln,
Norfolk, Suffolk, and Wiltshire ten apiece instead of
two. These reforms were all annulled at the Restora-
tion of Charles II. ; every insignificant borough was
restored with him ; and among the benefits which we
owe to the Restoration are the weakness and corrup-
tion of Parliament down to 1832, the dominance of
George in., perhaps the loss of the colonies of North
America, and the postponement till the nineteenth
century of the real supremacy of the House of
Commons and all that is involved therein. For
George in. and the Whig and Tory landlords could
not have pocketed the great county constituencies
created by Cromwell, as they did the tiny boroughs
restored by Charles II. Nabobs could not have bribed
the West Riding of Yorkshire as they did Old Sarum ;
and without these aids at his disposal, George III.
could not have kept Chatham out of power and Lord
North in office.
The question of the franchise was not treated in so
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 227
radical a manner. In fact, the borough franchise, with
all its absurdities and anomalies, was left alone ; pro-
bably it was thought too thorny a subject to be tackled
in the time at the disposal of the framers of this Con-
stitution. But a thorough-going change was effected
in the county franchise. As I have said before, the
qualification for a Parliamentary vote in the counties
was the possession of a forty-shilling freehold. This
sum had originally represented something like forty
pounds of our present currency, but by the middle of
the seventeenth century it had sunk to considerably
less than a quarter of that value, so that it was quite
possible to be a poor man and yet to have a county
vote. On the other hand, the vast majority of the
rural population was shut out altogether, because
copyhold and leasehold were more plentiful than free-
hold, and no amount of copyhold or leasehold entitled
its holder to a vote. This anomalous discrimination
was abolished by the Instrument of Government, and
the county franchise was made to depend on the one
uniform qualification of a real or personal estate to the
value of £200. This would, of course, exclude all
agricultural labourers, but it probably enfranchised a
great many more voters than it disfranchised.
There is one other point about this Constitution
which should, perhaps, be noticed. It left out the
House of Lords, and the omission was assuredly not
accidental. The Long Parliament in 1649 had de-
clared that the Commons of England assembled in
Parliament had found by too long experience that the
House of Lords was useless and dangerous to the
228 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
people of England, and had decreed that it should
thenceforth be wholly abolished and taken away, while
individual peers might, if they could, get elected to
the House of Commons. This decision, after five
years' experience, was respected by the Instrument of
Government ; but it is no part of my business in this
place to express an opinion whether this was or was
not, like other provisions of that document, an intelli-
gent anticipation of future reforms. You may either
lay stress on the fact that England had since 1649
prospered, especially in its repute abroad, in spite of its
lack of hereditary and noble councillors ; or you may
emphasise the fact that Cromwell, nevertheless, saw
fit three years later to restore a Second Chamber ; or
you may, thirdly, combine the two observations, and
deduce some conclusion from the fact that, although
Cromwell restored a Second Chamber, it was not
exactly our House of Lords.
But this Constitution, admirable though it may have
been in some or, perhaps, in most respects, was marred
by its conscious want of trust in the people, for whom
it was intended. To start with, it embodied a vast
number of penal disqualifications. Every one who
had aided, advised, assisted, or abetted in any war
against the Parliament since the first day of January
1641 was disqualified from voting or being elected for
the first four triennial Parliaments after the Instrument
came into force ; all who professed the Roman Catholic
religion, or had taken part in the Irish Rebellion, were
disqualified for ever. For the first three Parliaments,
moreover, the returns were to be made to the Council
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 229
of State, and members of Parliament were only to be
admitted if the Council approved of them. And in
the returns there was to be a stipulation that the
persons elected should have no power to alter the
government, as settled by the Instrument, in one single
person and a Parliament.
This last provision at once proved a bone of con-
tention. The arbitrary exclusion of a hundred mem-
bers by the Council had not been sufficiently drastic
a purge, and others began to impugn the validity of
the restrictions imposed on their liberty of debate and
powers of action. By what authority, they asked, had
these things been done? Who had the right to set
up fundamental law beyond their reach? And they
set to work to discuss the Instrument of Government,
which, according to Cromwell's idea of the Constitu-
tion, they had no power to alter. They insisted on
debating this Constitution instead of passing the
measures Cromwell wanted. He possessed his soul
in such patience as he could muster until the five
months had elapsed within which he could not, by
the Instrument, dissolve the Parliament; and then he
himself went down to the House and made a speech.
He spoke rather in sorrow than in anger. Never had
his hopes beat higher than when he first met this
Parliament, never had they been so keenly dis-
appointed. ' Instead of peace and ^settlement, instead
of mercy and truth being brought together, righteous-
ness and peace kissing each other, by reconciling the
honest people of these nations, and settling the woeful
distempers that are among us — which had been glorious
230 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
things and worthy of Christians to have proposed —
weeds and nettles, briars and thorns have thriven
under your shadow. Dissettlement and division, dis-
content and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers
to the whole, has been more multiplied within these
five months of your sitting than in some years before.
Foundations have also been laid for the future renew-
ing the troubles of these nations by all the enemies
of them abroad and at home/ Instead of construction,
they had been bent on destruction ; they had sought
the overthrow of the Instrument ; they had endeavoured
to make the Army discontented by refusing to pro-
vide its arrears of pay, and to make it odious to the
nation by compelling it to live at free quarters. The
partisans of Charles Stuart made capital out of the
Parliament, and laid plots of all kinds. And worse
than the Royalists in Oliver's eyes were the Levellers
or Commonwealth's Men, who ' have been and yet are
endeavouring to put us into blood and into confusion
— more desperate and dangerous confusion than Eng-
land ever yet saw. And I must say ... it is some
satisfaction, if a Commonwealth must perish, that it
perish by men, and not by the hands of persons differ-
ing little from beasts. That if it must needs suffer,
it should rather suffer from rich men than from poor
men, who, as Solomon says, " when they oppress, leave
nothing behind them, but are as a sweeping rain."
Now such as these have grown up under your shadow.1
Cromwell was a very middle-class and bourgeois re-
volutionary, and with this fear and detestation of the
lower classes, there is little wonder that he limited
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 231
the franchise in the counties to the possessors of a
£200 property qualification. He made no appeal to
the poorer classes, and this must be taken into account
when estimating the causes of the failure of the Puritan
system. Better, thought Cromwell, the Stuarts than
the Levellers ; better, thought the Levellers, the Stuarts
than Oliver Cromwell.
Both dangers were attributed by the Protector to
the folly of his Parliament. ' You have wholly elapsed
your time,' he exclaimed, ' and done just nothing ' ; and
the concluding moral of his speech was a dissolution.
The legal wig had fallen off; there was only left the
naked sword ; and England was divided up into eleven
districts, ruled by Major- Generals. Nothing could
have been less likely to conciliate public opinion, and
this, after all, was Cromwell's earnest desire, if only
it could be done without a Restoration of the Stuarts
and their ways. It was quite obvious that the nation
preferred government by a King and Parliament to
government by a Protector and the Army; and it
was determined to try the desperate expedient of a
Cromwellian dynasty. ' They are so highly incensed,'
wrote a member of Parliament, ' against the arbitrary
actings of the major-generals, that they are greedy of
any power that will be ruled and limited by law.'
Hereditary monarchy was also to be a protection for
the Protector, as well as for those who served him.
They would be protected by Henry VIl.'s statute pro-
viding that obedience to a de facto king should not
be treason ; he would be protected from assassination
by the consideration that his removal would only
232 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
place his son upon his throne. But the Army would
not have a king; and Cromwell himself had in his
speech dissolving the last Parliament quoted from
Ecclesiastes the query, ' Who knoweth whether he
may beget a wise man or a fool ? ' So the proposed
Royalty was reduced to the power of choosing a suc-
cessor. But the Humble Petition and Advice, as this
second constitution was called, had some advantages
over the Instrument of Government. It was drawn up
by an elected Parliament ; it was the work of lawyers
and merchants, and not of Cromwell's officers. And,
although there was to be fundamental law, that law
was not to be merely assumed without Parliamentary
authority. There were to be two Houses of Parlia-
ment ; the * ancient and undoubted liberties and
privileges of parliament ' were declared to be * the
birthright and inheritance of the people, wherein every
man is interested ' ; they were to be preserved and
maintained. Elected members were not to be ex-
cluded except by the decision of a parliamentary
commission. The 'other House' was to be chosen
by the Protector with the consent and approval of
the House of Commons — a provision somewhat similar
to those in force in New Zealand and Canada at the
present moment. The great officers of State were to
be appointed with the approval of both Houses of
Parliament ; no taxes were to be levied without its
consent, and it was to meet once in three years or
oftener. The questions of the franchise and the re-
distribution of seats were left for Parliament itself to
settle — if ever it got to business.
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 233
This it never did. Cromwell seemed to have almost
obtained what he wanted by the Humble Petition and
Advice. His authority rested at last upon a constitu-
tional basis ; he was no longer the mere nominee of
the Army, but the elect of the people's representatives.
He had, moreover, obtained an increased revenue and
augmented powers by the Humble Petition, and he
opened this Parliament in January 1658 with a speech
which reads like a paean of thanksgiving. Four days
later his tone was changed, and his hopes had given
way to fears. His chief partisans had been called up
to the ' other House/ to which the Republicans refused
to give the title of the House of Lords, and the balance
in the Lower House was almost even between the
Republican opposition and the Government. The
members, who had been excluded while the Humble
Petition was being elaborated, insisted on making the
speeches which they would have made then had they
been present. They made a dead set at the new
House of Lords. The providence of God, said one,
had delivered the people from an authority which
could exercise a veto on their resolutions. ' What was
fought for,' he asked, ' but to arrive at a capacity to
make your own laws?' The House of Lords was the
weak part of the Constitution : to the Republicans it
was the thin edge of Royalty ; it was disliked in the
Army, and schemes were afoot for a monster petition
calling on Fairfax to take the command instead of
Cromwell. On the 4th of February 1658 the Pro-
tector summoned both Houses to him. ' I would have
been glad/ he said, ' to have lived under my woodside,
234 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertook
such a government as this is ... You have not only
disjointed yourselves, but the whole nation. . . . These
things tend to nothing else but playing the King of
Scots' game (if I may so call him) : and I think
myself bound before God to do what I can to prevent
it. ... It hath been not only your endeavour to per-
vert the Army while you have been sitting, and to
draw them to state the question about a Common-
wealth ; but some of you have been enlisting persons,
by commission of Charles Stuart, to join with any
insurrection that may be made. And what is likely
to come upon this, the enemy being ready to invade
us, but even present blood and confusion? And if
this be so, I do assign it to this cause : your not assent-
ing to what you did invite me to by the Petition and
Advice, as that which might be the settlement of the
nation. And if this be the end of your sitting, and
this be your carriage, I think it high time that an
end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this
Parliament. And let God be judge between you and
me.' ' Amen,' responded the defiant Republicans.
It was the last of Cromwell's Parliaments. Seven
months later Oliver himself was dead and Richard his
son reigned in his stead. ' Who knoweth/ Oliver had
asked, ' whether he may beget a wise man or a fool ? '
And there followed eighteen months of bewildering
revolution. Then, amid the drunken frenzy of a
delirious people, there dawned the golden days of
good King Charles — a monarch who had no heart and
knew no shame, who debauched a whole generation,
CROMWELLIAN CONSTITUTIONS 235
who swindled the national creditors and sold himself
and his country to Louis of France for gold. The
Restoration meant a good deal else : it meant the
disintegration of the United Kingdom and the dis-
memberment of the Imperial Parliament. It meant the
restoration of legislative independence to Scotland,
Ireland and the Channel Islands, the revival of rotten
boroughs, the restoration of the House of Lords on its
ancient and antiquated basis, and the restitution of
that 'veto on the people's resolutions.' It meant a
hideous moral reaction, an orgy of open shame. Sin
sat enthroned on the sovereign's seat and vice was
crowned king at court, while the author of Pilgrim's
Progress lay twelve long years in Bedford county gaol ;
and up the Thames there rolled the roar of the Dutch-
men's guns to where Oliver's head gazed, a ghastly
sight, from a pole over Westminster Hall.
Against this mass of corruption, cruelty, treason, and
shame there is this to be set. The Restoration was not
only the restoration of a King with a foul mind and an
evil heart ; it was also the restoration of Parliament,
unfettered by rigid law and freed from the fear of the
force of arms, a Parliament which, if not yet sovereign,
was soon to make its title good, and slowly earn the
envy of the world. If the Restoration banished the
Ten Commandments from high places in the land, it
also banished the sword from the High Court of
Parliament. A mighty fall was there ; but the nation
fell back from arduous paths which led towards barren
heights, and resumed the truer ways of peaceful progress
towards the goals of liberty, self-government, and law.
236 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
X
COLONIAL EXPANSION
PROBABLY all of you are familiar with that well-known
quip of Horace Walpole's, when he wrote in 1759 that
it was necessary to ask each morning at breakfast
what victories there had been, for fear of missing one.
It was the year in which the French fleets were beaten
off Lagos and Quiberon Bay and the French army at
the battle of Minden, the year in which Guadeloupe
was captured and Havre was bombarded ; and finally,
the year in which Wolfe stormed the heights of Quebec
and laid Canada at England's feet. I think it has
been described as the birth-year of the British Empire.
But it was only one in a series of wonderful years
of victory. Its predecessor, 1758, had brought the
capture of Louisburg, Cape Breton, and Fort Duquesne;
its successor, 1760, brought the battle of Wandewash,
which secured Madras and completed the downfall of
the French power in India ; and 1762 saw the capture
of the capitals of Cuba and of the Philippine Islands.
If the year 1759 was not actually the birth-year of the
Empire, it would at least seem that we could not date
its advent into the world very far from the Seven
Years' War.
COLONIAL EXPANSION 237
But we are all inclined to attach a somewhat
excessive importance to our birthdays — until we reach
a certain age, when we go to the other extreme and
like to ignore them altogether ; and the emphasis laid
upon the events of the year 1759 has unduly diminished
in our eyes the importance of the processes and
developments which preceded that year and which
alone made possible its striking triumphs. The fall of
the French dominion in Canada, the establishment of
what was practically a British monopoly over the
continent of North America, would not have been
achieved, at the middle of the eighteenth century, had
it not been for the colonial and naval developments of
the seventeenth ; and the significance of seventeenth-
century colonial history has been obscured by the
dramatic interest of the domestic history of that time.
It is to the importance of these germs of empire in the
seventeenth century that I wish to call your attention
now.
It was, in fact, during that century that the political
changes which followed upon the Seven Years' War
were preordained. In the same way gradual causes,
silently working through many years, preordain which
trees will weather the storm and which will be laid low.
The superficial observer is content with the outward
manifestation, and only remarks that the tree fell
because the wind blew. But the scientific student, the
man interested in forestry and in the preservation of
trees, wants to know why some trees fell, while others
survived. He knows that storms must come, and his
business is, by taking thought, to see that they do as
238 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
little damage as possible. He is not content to take
the storms and their effects as things entirely beyond
his understanding and control. So, the real student of
history is not content to attribute the creation of the
Empire to the storm and stress of the Seven Years'
War. That war raged over many spheres ; it only
produced far-reaching results in some. Nearly every
country in Europe took part in it, but it is not a great
landmark in the history of Russia, of Sweden, or of
Spain. Even the principal actors were only affected
in parts of their dominions. The boundaries of the
European States were hardly altered ; Austria failed to
recover Silesia, but that result was merely a recognition
of the status quo. Outside Europe the consequences
were, of course, more serious, but even in America
there were vast dominions belonging to the pro-
tagonists of the war which remained almost unaffected
by its results. South and Central America continued
predominantly Spanish, and the French settlements on
the west coast of Africa were for the most part left
alone. Why was the Seven Years' War fatal to some
and not to other dominions ?
That is the question which we have to answer, and,
in seeking a solution, we shall be led to the conclu-
sion that more than victories on land and sea is needed
in the building of an empire. Even a battle is only
the summing-up, in a striking and dramatic way, of
a series of causes. Nelson could not have won the
battle of Trafalgar had it not been for the adminis-
trative work of Earl St. Vincent at the Admiralty.
Indeed, the British Empire has not been really won
COLONIAL EXPANSION 239
by military conquest ; there has been no great con-
queror in British history like Alexander, Hannibal,
or Napoleon, none of whom, it may be incidentally
remarked, succeeded in founding a permanent empire.
Military skill of course is needed, but it can only work
on materials and conditions provided for it, and these
are more important than the military skill. Dominion
acquired by the sword can only be maintained by the
sword, and ultimately the sword always fails unless it
is reinforced by the arts and crafts of peace. The
essential factor in the building of the British Empire,
the factor which distinguishes it from the jerry-built
empire of Napoleon, is the colonist, not the colonel, the
settler, not the sergeant. He has wielded the spade
and trowel, and not the sword and spear ; he has
scattered seeds, not blows, and has returned bringing
his sheaves with him — sheaves of good grain, and not
the tares of human tears and curses.
The soldier and the sailor in 1759 were, then, only
putting the final touches to a process which had been
going on for a century and a half ; and, before a blow
had been struck, or a victory won in the Seven Years'
War, it had been determined that North America
should belong to English-speaking races, and to no
one else. This is clear enough if we mentally look at
a map of North America, as it was in 1756, and con-
sider the relative position of the rival claimants to the
inheritance. The sparse trading-posts in the far north,
Hudson's Bay, New North Wales, New South Wales,
and New Britain, as these territories then were called,
did not bulk very large in the eyes of European states-
240 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
men ; but they all belonged to Great Britain, and they
shut in the French dominions to the neighbourhood of
the great lakes and the River St. Lawrence. South
and east of them came the solid block of the Thirteen
Colonies, stretching all along the eastern sea-board
from Nova Scotia down to Florida. Now, the French
population numbered eighty thousand, but the popula-
tion of Virginia alone was two hundred thousand, and
the total white population of the British North
American colonies was a million and a quarter. There
were fifteen Britons for every Frenchman, and it is on
that fact that I base my statement that before a shot
was fired in the Seven Years' War, the future of North
America had been already ear-marked for the British
race. Of course, the numerical proportion is not every-
thing ; if the Britons had been blacks or Red Indians,
the French might still have won, though the policy of
the old regime in France discouraged the development
of colonies ; and the slow growth of Canada, while it
was French, did not hold out the prospect that the
French, if left alone, would very quickly colonise the
rest of North America. But, as those million and a
quarter were British settlers, the conclusion was fore-
gone. Whether there were a Seven Years' War or not,
the million and a quarter were destined to prevail over
the eighty thousand.
Now, the all-important question to solve in American
history is this : How came there to be in 1756 a popula-
tion of a million and a quarter British subjects occupy-
ing the whole, or almost the whole, sea-board of the
present United States? This result had not been
COLONIAL EXPANSION 241
achieved without serious trouble, or as a matter of
course. There had been numerous competitors, and a
century before the Seven Years' War no one could
have anticipated such an overwhelming preponderance
of Britons in North America as had been established
by 1756. Let us take a glance at the map of North
America about the middle of the seventeenth century.
The solid mass of British colonies does not exist ; and
the territory which they afterwards occupied presents
a variegated political appearance. To the north there
are, it is true, the New England colonies, but they
stand alone. Their southern as well as their northern
neighbours are foreigners; while on the north they
have the French, on the south they have the Dutch.
There is no such place as New York ; it is called New
Amsterdam, and is peopled by the Dutch, and is part
of the New Netherlands. Pennsylvania does not exist ;
and the future States of New Jersey and Delaware are
a Swedish settlement. Then at length we come to
British territory again in Maryland and Virginia. But
they are isolated, and south of them lies the vast and
ill-defined district of Florida, belonging to Spain, and
west is the still vaster and vaguer territory of Louisiana,
which is French.
What will be the final colour of this mass of patch-
work ? No one can tell in Cromwell's time, but it is
fairly certain that the power which can paint that
country red will dominate the whole North American
continent. And the question is really decided in the
reign of Charles II., not a period with which one
usually associates the idea of imperial expansion. We
Q
242 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
have heard a good deal lately about Cromwell and the
Empire, and attempts have been made to set him up
as the patron-saint of Liberal Imperialism. It is the
irony of fate that far more extensive and important
additions should have been made to the Empire under
the rule of the monarch who let Dutch guns blaze
away in the Medway and the Thames. The cession
of New Amsterdam and the New Netherlands was a
handsome compensation for that insult. The seven-
teenth has thus some claim to stand beside the
eighteenth century as an important era in the making
of the Empire.
Let us consider for a moment how it compares with
the sixteenth, which is, I suppose, next to the
eighteenth century the most important era, according
to the popular notion, in the history of the Empire.
But, if we examine the extent of the Empire at the
death of Queen Elizabeth, we shall be astonished to
find how slight it was, and how meagre had been the
achievements of the Elizabethan era, when measured
in the number of English colonists and in the number
of square miles covered by their settlements. Henry vil.
had, indeed, encouraged Cabot, who had discovered
Newfoundland; and in 1536 a person called Armagil
Waad visited Newfoundland, Cape Breton, and Penguin
Island, for which somewhat slender achievements his
admirers dubbed him the ' English Columbus.' Later
on, Frobisher explored the coasts of Greenland and
Labrador, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert did actually
found a colony at St. John in Newfoundland in 1583.
This was the earliest British colony founded in North
COLONIAL EXPANSION 243
America ; but the colonists were many of them taken
from English gaols, and the better class, which con-
sisted of sailors more useful on sea than on land,
sought to be taken home or anywhere rather than be
left on that scene of disorder and crime. Gilbert was
drowned on the way home. ' We are as near Heaven,'
he was heard to say shortly before his vessel foundered,
' by sea as by land ' ; and it was the spirit, rather than
the achievements, of the sea-dogs which gives them
the title of builders of empire. Raleigh was hardly
more successful as a founder of colonies than his half-
brother, Humphrey Gilbert. His first attempt to
colonise Virginia in 1585 failed owing to quarrels
between the English and the natives, and among the
English leaders themselves. A second and larger
expedition in 1587 did leave eighty-nine men, seven-
teen women, and two children behind it; but the
reinforcements sent out in the following year turned
pirates; and when, in 1589, tardy relief did actually
reach America, the original colonists had disappeared,
and no trace of them was ever afterwards found. So
that, in 1603, tne net English achievement in the way
of a colonial empire was practically nil.
Nor, indeed, had these expeditions gone forth as a
rule with any idea of founding a colonial empire at all.
It may be doubted whether any successful colonial
empire ever has been founded with that as the original
idea. It is much talked of, but it has never been a
very powerful motive, and those who talk loudest about
expanding the Empire generally return to the haven
of Park Lane as soon as they have made their pile.
244 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Colonies designed under stress of the imperial idea,
like those of Germany in South- West Africa, or those
of France in North Africa, do not flourish, and are not
really colonies at all. Some more definite and practical
motive than imperial sentiment has to be found before
men will undergo the hardships involved in the estab-
lishment of new communities in distant lands. In
recent times the real basis of imperial sentiment has
been the commercial instinct ; the flag has been valued
as a commercial asset, and some pronounced im-
perialists have been found to have made not incon-
siderable, and sometimes improper, profits out of their
country in times of war. On the eve of the War of
American Independence Horace Walpole writes that
Birmingham was enthusiastically in its favour because
it had a small-arms manufactory. But this kind of
spirit has been more apt at breaking up than at found-
ing empires ; and the signal failure of the Elizabethans
to found colonies must be ascribed, in part at least, to
the fact that their motive was gain, either from gold
mines or from commerce. They wanted, not the white
man's burden, but the white man's percentages ; they
were more concerned with interest than with principle ;
their ideal was, not Empire, but Eldorado. They pre-
ferred coloured labour to white because it was cheaper,
and so they started the negro slave trade. That curse
has come home to roost ; and it has been calculated
that by the end of the present century there may be a
population of a hundred million negroes in the United
States. That means a race war, of which the lawless
lynchings and burnings of to-day are but a faint and
COLONIAL EXPANSION 245
distant rumble. Repentance has come, of a sort ; but
it has not wiped out the effects of the original crime
of thinking that dividends exalt a nation more than
righteousness.
The negro slaves were intended for the mines of
Mexico and Peru, which were in Spanish hands, and
even the trade in them was English in only a minor
degree. Nor is the piracy charged against the English
sea-dogs a very disgraceful accusation. Piracy was the
only form of trade with the Indies open to English-
men, for the Spaniards and Portuguese tried to exclude
the traders of all other nations but themselves from
American commerce. They based their claim to
monopoly on the award of Pope Alexander VI., and
the only right the Pope had to decide such a question
was derived from the Donation of Constantine, and
that was forged. There was no reason why the
English, who had repudiated the authority of the
Pope in religious matters, should respect it in a far
more doubtful sphere. For all that, their motives
were anything but lofty ; fortunately, they did not
find the gold they sought, or England would probably
have adopted the strange delusion of the Spaniards
that gold and silver were the only forms of wealth.
But gold and silver were their object, and Queen
Elizabeth's imperial enthusiasm always waxed or
waned according to the booty brought into her
coffers by Drake or other bold, bad buccaneers. As
early as the reign of Edward VI., one Richard Eden
had pointed out that, if England had only been
awake to her interests, the bullion in the royal ware-
246 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
house at Seville might have been reposing in the
Tower.
Next to gold-mines, trade-routes were the object of
discovery ; and it was their desire to find a short-cut
to the Indies which led Willoughby and Chancellor
towards the White Sea, Frobisher, Baffin, Davis, and
Hudson to the straits and bays which bear their names
to-day. Even the earliest settlements of Gilbert and
Raleigh were perhaps designed as outposts against the
Spaniards rather than as colonies ; and the French
were, curiously enough, in advance of the English in
their ideas of colonisation. In 1506 a Frenchman had
first entered the St. Lawrence, and named the island
at the mouth of it Cape Breton — a puzzling name,
which so struck the Duke of Newcastle that, when as
Secretary of State he first learnt that Cape Breton was
an island, he rushed off to communicate the astonishing
intelligence to Pitt. Then, in 1534, Jacques Cartier
of St. Malo sailed up the river, and determined to found
a colony in the country. In 1 540 he led a band of two
hundred French colonists thither, and they formed the
nucleus of the Canadian nation. Next the great
Huguenot leader, the Admiral Coligny, took up the
idea of forming colonies as a refuge for persecuted
Protestants ; but the wars of religion in France
absorbed his energies, and that idea came to nothing
for the time, though other Frenchmen sought and
gained a temporary footing in the Spanish Florida.
On the conclusion of the Civil Wars in 1598, Henry IV.
again took up the idea; in 1603 Champlain founded
Quebec, and a few years afterwards Montreal. Canada
COLONIAL EXPANSION 247
was under weigh before the United States ; and the
spacious times of Queen Elizabeth did not include
colonial expansion.
The foundations of empire were, in fact, laid in the
seventeenth and not in the sixteenth century ; and they
were laid by men who would never have been called,
or have called themselves, imperialists. Their motive
was not to expand, but to escape, the England of
James I., and these pioneers and colonists had no wish
to reproduce the conditions they had left behind.
They wanted something different, and something better.
They went for something which they prized more
highly than gold or silver ; they would not turn back
because they did not see a dividend in sight ; their
minds were stayed on religious conviction, and not
puffed up with imperial pride. ' Lest we forget ' was
their daily thought ; it was not reserved for show at
a Diamond Jubilee, and then drowned in a greater
debauch than ever. They were of the stuff of which
nations are made ; power came to them in the fulness
of time, and prosperity in good measure, not because
they sought it, but because they sought first of all
righteousness according to their lights.
It was the Pilgrim Fathers and their children who
made the New England across the sea ; but they were
not the earliest colonists in America who went out in
the reign of James I. Indeed, colonisation of Virginia,
on the lines suggested by Raleigh, had been attempted
by various people since 1589, but misfortune dogged
their steps ; and even when the Virginia Company was
fairly started in 1606, and a band of settlers established
248 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
under Captain John Smith on the James River, the
colonists proved unsatisfactory, and the colony was
more than once on the verge of breaking up. The
principal cause was that the settlement was regarded
as a speculation, to be exploited entirely in the interests
of the Company. The settlers had no property in the
land they tilled, and their profits were to go to swell
the wealth of the promoters. It was not until this
system had been altered, and the merits of Virginia
tobacco realised, that the colony began to take root
and flourish. Nor did it ever show the robust and
stubborn vigour of New England, which within a
generation had begotten four of the original thirteen
United States. The tobacco planters of Virginia, with
their large estates, their slaves, and their comparatively
luxurious existence, would by themselves have been a
poor protection against the French and Dutch rivals of
the British colonists. The Puritan settlers were the
backbone of the English power ; they were organised
in townships, not plantations ; and they were a demo-
cratic rather than an aristocratic society.
Not that there was anything idyllic about these New
England colonies. They soon showed that they con-
ceived of liberty as being a privilege, and not a common
right to be enjoyed by all alike. Religious toleration
was a thing they wanted for themselves and not for
others ; and uniformity was to be as rigid in the New
England as it had been in the Old. The difference
was, that they were to do the persecution instead of
being persecuted ; and Roger Williams had to flee from
them as they had fled from Laud. Their ideal was
COLONIAL EXPANSION 249
borrowed from Geneva of the Calvinists, where Church
and State were one ; where only the orthodox were
entitled to a vote ; where every ecclesiastical offence
was an act of civil disobedience ; where obstinate
refusal to communicate and continued or frivolous
absence from church were punishable crimes ; where
the creed was a law of the State, and heresy as much an
offence as immorality. It was no place for any one but
a Puritan ; and when Roman Catholics also sought an
asylum from English persecution in America, they
wisely set up for themselves. Their leader, Sir George
Calvert, afterwards Lord Baltimore, as early as 1612
had obtained a patent of Newfoundland from James I. ;
but the rigour of the climate and the attacks of the
French in Canada during the war of 1626-9 induced
his followers to remove to Maryland, named after
Henrietta Maria, with its capital called Baltimore,
from the title of its founder.
Meanwhile rivals from other European countries had
appeared upon the scene. In 1614 the Dutch, relieved
by the Twelve Years' Truce from their war with Spain,
turned their attention to the New World, and founded
the New Netherlands, with their two chief settlements
at New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, between New
England and Virginia. On the river Delaware, too,
Sweden established a colony called New Sweden, which
was doomed to a brief and undistinguished career-
More important was the development of the French
power in the north. In 1604 the foundation of Quebec
and Montreal had been followed by the settlement of a
colony of fishermen and woodcutters at Port Royal,
250 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
now called Annapolis, on the Bay of Fundy — a settle-
ment which was destroyed by an expedition from
Virginia in 1613. This exploit was followed up in
1621 by James I.'s grant to Sir William Alexander,
afterwards Earl of Stirling, of practically the whole of
Canada, under the name of New Scotland or Nova
Scotia. The patent conferred enormous rights upon
Alexander — on paper ; but to induce colonists to settle
was another matter, especially when the King wanted
also to make money out of the transaction. James's
favourite bauble was dangled before men's eyes : every
one who would pay the King a hundred and fifty pounds
should receive a grant of land three miles long and
two miles broad, and a baronetcy. Thus that slighted
order of Nova Scotia Baronets came into existence, and
a barren land was to bloom with baronets.
But this grant might have had important conse-
quences. In 1626, owing to the foolish policy of
Buckingham and Charles I., England was involved in
war with France. With both countries claiming the
greater part of Canada, it was natural that the war
should spread to North America; and then a little-
known event took place. Wolfe was not the first
Briton who conquered Quebec for the British Crown.
He was anticipated in 1628 by an Englishman of Derby-
shire, named Gervase Kirke, who has not even found
a place in the Dictionary of National Biography. Kirke
had lived at Dieppe, and had there married a French-
woman ; but in spite of all temptations he remained
an Englishman, and used whatever knowledge he had
acquired from his French connections in the interests
COLONIAL EXPANSION 251
of his native land and of himself. In 1627 he obtained
letters of marque from Charles I., fitted out three ships,
commanded by his three sons, and sailed for the
St. Lawrence. There were many Huguenots among
the crews who, having been expelled from New France
as settlers, returned as enemies. There Kirke captured
or sank the whole French naval force in the river.
Sailing back to England with their spoil, they returned
in the following year to complete their conquest. The
French garrison had been reduced almost to a state of
starvation, and the governor could do nothing except
arrange the terms of a dignified surrender. Quebec
and the whole of New France passed into English
hands, and remained under English control for three
years. Then came peace, and all was given back to
France. Charles and his advisers had no notion of a
colonial policy at all, or of the potential value of
Canada. His financial necessities were much more
important in his eyes, and they were caused by his
attempt to rule in defiance of his Parliament. The
motive which induced him to surrender the greater
part of North America was the payment by France of
the residue of the dowry of Henrietta Maria — some
sixty thousand pounds — which would relieve him of
the immediate necessity of appealing for Parliamentary
grants. The Kirkes and their associates, who had
conquered Canada at their own expense, were not
repaid, except by the grant of a barren knighthood
to David Kirke, which cost Charles nothing. That
was his idea of empire-building.
The services of Charles I. to the American colonies
252 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
were, however, great, but they were undesigned. The
idea of New England as a refuge from the Old had by
this time taken root, and the more unbearable Charles
and Laud made things at home, the greater numbers
flocked abroad ; and fortunately the Stuarts were
unable to exclude religious dissidents from their
colonies as the French government did the Huguenots
from theirs. Over twenty thousand colonists are
computed to have sailed from Old to New England
between the accession of Charles i. and the opening
of the Long Parliament in 1640 ; and one of the
unrehearsed effects of the activity of that Parliament
was to check this stream of emigration. These
colonists formed a number of almost independent
municipalities, which were a peculiar feature of New
England, but resembled the municipalities of the
United Provinces ; for those provinces not only formed
a federation, but each province was itself a federation
of towns and cities. So in New England each munici-
pality was sovereign in itself, and stood to the colony
or State in much the same relation as the individual
State now stands to the American Confederation.
But in 1643 the need was felt of a wider union.
There had been differences with the Dutch; the
Indians were supposed to be hostile ; there was always
the French danger in the north ; and there might be
advantages in presenting a united front to the
authorities at home. So at Boston in May 1643 a
confederacy called the United Colonies of New Eng-
land was formed. Two commissioners from each of
the four federating colonies were to meet annually, or
COLONIAL EXPANSION 253
oftener, if necessary, and to choose a President from
among themselves. No war was to be declared by a
colony without the consent of the federal commis-
sioners, and the expenses were to be apportioned
among the colonies according to their population.
Mutual arrangements were made for the surrender of
fugitive criminals and for the recognition of the judicial
decisions of the contracting colonies ; and the main-
tenance of ' the truth and liberties of the Gospel ' was
declared to be the object of the Federation. Not a
few of these provisions were anticipations of the
famous American Constitution of a hundred and fifty
years later ; but more important was the fact that
these colonies should be claiming to act and acting
just as though they were sovereign states, without the
least reference to the powers from whom they had
derived their existence and authority. Of course,
it must be remembered that at this moment no
English government was in a position to intervene
and restrain this independent tendency. But it
should be noted that this tendency to confederate
and claim the right of almost independent powers of
self-government was an early and a gradual growth ;
it was not, as is sometimes represented, the sudden
outcome of the Seven Years' War, which relieved the
English colonies from all fear of molestation on the
part of the French, and, by thus rendering them
independent of home protection, made them more
impatient of home control.
There was little need of protection against the home
government during the Commonwealth and Protec-
254 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
torate ; for Puritan called unto Puritan and both
responded. In 1642 Parliament had passed a resolu-
tion freeing New England from the import and export
duties levied on other colonies ; and in 1644 Massa-
chusetts made a law that any one seeking to raise a
party for the King should be treated as an enemy
to the State. Massachusetts, too, was wonderfully
accommodating with regard to the question, which
was raised at that time, whether the English Parlia-
ment had any authority over them, as they were not
represented in it. They had not disputed their
subjection to the King, but the abolition of the
monarchy raised a different question. They recognised,
however, that Parliament was their best friend and
made a curious admission. All land in America had
at the original grant been treated as detached portions
of the manor of East Greenwich ; and the colonists
now conceded that, as they held their lands of that
manor, they were really represented in Parliament by
the knights of the shire for Kent. They were of
another mind in 1775.
With the Restoration this harmony was broken up.
The first dispute arose over the Quakers. The English
Privy Council forbade the colonists to inflict any bodily
punishment on those peaceful people, and ordered
that they should be sent to England for their trial.
The colonists refused, not entirely from bloodthirsty
motives, but because concession would have meant the
surrender of their right to try all offences in the
colony. There were differences also with respect to
the King's demand that churchmen should be admitted
COLONIAL EXPANSION 255
to the franchise, and about the extradition of two
regicides who had escaped to the colonies. But
colonies outside the New England Confederation had
a happier time than the stubborn Massachusetts ;
Rhode Island and Connecticut had their charters con-
firmed and extended ; and the planters of Virginia had
more in common with the government of Charles II. than
with their fellow-countrymen in Puritan New England.
These southern lands were indeed more suited to
the royalists, and in 1663 the colony of Carolina was
founded to the south of Virginia and named after
Charles 11. It was apparently intended to compensate
those royalists who had suffered during the Civil War
and had found the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity
passed at the Restoration to be an Act of Oblivion for
the King's friends and Indemnity for his enemies. The
Lord Chancellor Clarendon, Shaftesbury, and others
were interested in the movement, and the philosopher,
John Locke, was associated with Shaftesbury in draw-
ing up a fundamental constitution for the colony. In
spite of the eminence of its authors the Constitution
was never put in force, and, indeed, it had been drawn
up on theoretical principles with little reference to,
and without any knowledge of, the practical require-
ments of the colony for which it was intended. By
the time that the colony was settled enough for a
constitution, it had developed ideas of its own as to
what that constitution should be like, and the colonists
expressed a decided preference for the institutions
they had developed without the assistance of political
philosophers. Carolina, which was soon split up into
256 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
North and South Carolina, marks the furthest extension
of the English southwards in the seventeenth century ;
and only one more colony was added in that direction
before the great disruption came. That one was
Georgia, founded in 1732 by General James Ogle-
thorpe, partly as a military outpost against the
Spaniards, but chiefly as a benevolent institution.
For Oglethorpe, driven, as Pope expressed it, 'by-
vast benevolence of soul ' and by a survey of crowded
debtors' prisons, founded Georgia as an outlet for
those who would otherwise have spent their lives in
the workhouse or the gaol.
But the greatest colonial achievement of the reign
of Charles II. was the filling up of the gulf between the
northern colonies of New England and the southern
colonies of Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. The
Swedes had already facilitated this process by suc-
cumbing to the Dutch in 1664, but the Dutch left
deeper marks upon the history of America. Among
the mayors and aldermen of New York we early find
the names of Roosevelt, Bayard, Schuyler,and Wendell,
reminding us that not a few of the presidents, ambas-
sadors, generals, and men of letters of the United
States are descendants of the Dutch founders of the
New Netherlands. ' Boss ' and * Bowery,' neither of
them pleasant terms, are both of Dutch derivation,
and suggest that there was a legacy of evil as well as
one of good. The acquisition of these Dutch colonies
was one of the most barefaced instances of the policy
of ' grab ' in the history of the Empire. The Dutch
commanded the finest harbour on the eastern coast
COLONIAL EXPANSION 257
of America, and their river Hudson was the most
convenient waterway for the fur trade with the
interior ; but they had enjoyed these advantages
unmolested and unchallenged for fifty years, when in
1664, while both nations were at peace, the English
government suddenly discovered that priority of dis-
covery entitled it to claim them, and resolved to put
the claim in execution. The Dutch could only answer
with a declaration of war, but the New Netherlands
were in no condition to defend themselves against the
expedition sent out under the auspices of the Duke of
York, then Lord High Admiral ; and New Amsterdam
became New York and Fort Orange was converted
into Albany. In the Second Dutch War of the
Restoration these colonies were recovered by the
Dutch, but the recovery was only temporary, and at
the Treaty of Breda in 1674 they became permanently
parts of the dominions of the English-speaking world,
The acquisition of the New Netherlands was, it has
been truly said, a turning-point in American history.
It made it possible for the English colonies to become
one united dominion. But for it, there would have been
no solid mass of English settlements stretching from
Florida to Nova Scotia, and hopelessly outweighing in
the balances the colonies of France and Spain ; but
for it there would have been no War of American
Independence and no United States.
There remains to be said a word as to the form in
which these new acquisitions were fashioned by the
conquerors, and the expiring effort of the Stuarts to
crush Puritanism and liberty in the New World. New
R
258 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
York became the property of the Duke, who had full
power to legislate for it on his own authority without
the participation of any popular representative ; and
a design has been attributed to the Government of
Charles II. to centralise the administration of all the
colonies under the control of the Crown. But in 1683
a constitution was granted to New York, and no
serious attempt was made to interfere with it during
the reign of James II. Another part of the New
Netherlands was sold to Lord Berkeley and Sir George
Carteret, and was called New Jersey, in honour of the
gallant defence of Jersey made by Carteret against
the Parliamentarians. All religious sects were to enjoy
liberty of worship and equal political rights in this
colony, and it afforded a refuge for the Quakers. But
it was threatened in 1686 with an attack by James II.
upon its charter, and was only saved by the Revolu-
tion. One of the proprietors of New Jersey was the
famous Quaker, William Penn, who desired to improve
upon the religious liberty existing in New Jersey by
founding an exclusively Quaker colony. With this
object he obtained a grant from Charles II. of the
land now known as Pennsylvania. The distinguish-
ing feature of the colony was its decent treatment of
the Indians, but it had internal troubles, and in 1703
the discontented section seceded to found the little
State of Delaware.
It was the Puritan colonies of New England which
excited the animosity of the Stuarts, and they were
threatened with the fate which overtook their co-
religionists at home. Their strongholds had been the
COLONIAL EXPANSION 259
corporate towns, whose representatives in the House
of Commons had made themselves so obnoxious to
the Court during the latter part of Charles's reign.
When that king won his victory in 1680, he turned
at once against these corporations, and by writs of
Quo Warranto succeeded in annulling their charters,
and filling their places with royal nominees. The
same policy was then tried in North America. Massa-
chusetts had given additional offence by secretly
purchasing what is now the State of Maine, which
Charles intended to bestow upon the Duke of Mon-
mouth. It had also undoubtedly turned its charter
to purposes which had never been intended. In 1683
the charter was annulled on the ground that the colony
had systematically violated the Navigation Acts, and
had illegally set up a mint and coined money on its
own authority. Rhode Island was induced to sur-
render, and in 1686 the charter of Connecticut was
likewise declared forfeit. All these colonies, with New
Hampshire and Maine, were to be united in one State,
and to be ruled despotically by a Governor and Council
nominated by the King. The Governor, Sir Edmund
Andros, was as incompetent as he was arbitrary ; and
when, in 1688, there came news of the revolution in
England, there was another revolution as bloodless
and complete in the New England across the sea.
The objects of the two revolutions were much the
same, their achievement was very different. The
legislatures of the American colonies wanted the same
powers of self-government as were secured by the
English Parliament. The Bill of Rights prohibited
260 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
the levying of taxes, the raising or keeping of a stand-
ing army in the kingdom without consent of Parlia-
ment; in 1692 the legislature of Massachusetts passed
an Act declaring that no tax should be levied in the
colony without its own consent. The Bill of Rights
received the royal assent, the Massachusetts bill did
not. The revolution in England had made the English
Parliament master in its own house ; the revolution
in the colonies left them at the arbitrament of another.
There you have the root of the War of Independence.
And so the causes of the one disruption of the Empire,
as well as the causes which made that Empire, may
be traced back to the seventeenth century; and we
are brought back to the thesis with which we started,
that there is nothing really sudden in the great
developments of history. Nothing can be explained
in human affairs without reference to the past.
Hence the value of history ; it contains the causes
which have produced the men, the nations, and the
empires of to-day ; it supplies the only means whereby
we may understand the present, and the only solid
ground on which we can base our forecasts of the
future. It is the strangest educational phenomenon
of the time that educational authorities, governments,
universities, some county-councils, and most head-
masters should be under the delusion that they can
turn out efficient citizens without the glimmering of
an idea as to the causes which have made them what
they are. The Duke of Newcastle, who did not know
that Cape Breton was an island, has his counterpart
in the Government departments of to-day ; and it is
COLONIAL EXPANSION 261
neglect of historical studies which often makes the
brilliant man of science as inefficient in the sphere of
politics as is the politician in the world of science.
No one, however, is called upon to deal with scientific
matters without some scientific training ; but every
one is called upon to play his part as a citizen of the
Empire, and every one should possess some mental
qualification for the duties which his country expects
him to perform.
262 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
XI
THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON AND THE STUDY
OF HISTORY1
IT may seem a bold and hazardous thing to have put
two such topics as the University of London and the
Study of History into the title of an hour's lecture ;
for either of them might well afford material for at
least a dozen discourses. But I have no intention of
attempting to deal with either in its general aspects ;
it is only of the University of London in its relation
to the Study of History, and of the Study of History
in relation to the University of London, that I propose
to speak at the present time. If there be presumption
on my part in approaching these subjects at all, a few
facts will, I think, justify the view that it is none too
soon for some one to call attention to the position
which the study of history at present occupies in the
University of London.
An eminent member of the Senate of the University,
1 This lecture was originally delivered at University College in October
1904. During the two and a half years which have elapsed since that
time some progress has been made. The footnotes will indicate how
considerable that progress has been, and how many of the suggestions
here discussed have been actually adopted, or are in the process of
adoption.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 263
in a recently published book on London Education,1
refers more than once to what he describes as ' the
dwindling Faculty of Arts.' Now I am not prepared
to defend or dispute the general truth of that phrase ;
but those of us who are interested in the study of
Modern History cannot conceal from ourselves the
fact that that school is not in a healthy condition.
The University Calendar itself bears mournful testi-
mony to the truth of this statement. I take the Class
Lists for recent years. It was in 1896, I believe, that
the separate examination in History for the B.A.
Honours degree was established. In that year there
were three candidates who obtained a Class; in 1897
there was one; in 1898 there was one; in 1899 there
were none ; in 1900 there were five ; in 1901 there was
one; and in 1902 there were five again. The total for
seven years is thus sixteen, or an average of just
over two a year. That does not strike one as a par-
ticularly brilliant result ; but, when these lists are
scrutinised somewhat more closely, the result for
London itself is still more distressing ; for, of those
sixteen candidates, only six were produced by the
various institutions which now make up the teaching
University of London ; and of those six only one has
been granted First Class Honours — one candidate a
year, and one candidate in seven years of First Class
standing2 — surely extraordinary figures for a Univer-
1 Sidney Webb, Problems of London Education, 1903.
- This condition of things no longer exists. In 1905 the first B.A.
Honours Examination in Modern History for Internal Students (i.e.
students who have had three years' instruction at some recognised school or
under some recognised teacher of the University) was held. There were
264 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
sity which aims at providing the highest possible
education for a population numbering some seven
millions of souls, a population many times more
numerous than that which produced the Art and the
Literature, the Science and the Statesmanship of
Ancient Athens, a population more numerous than
that which made the Roman Empire, a population
more numerous than those of the Holland, the Belgium,
the Switzerland of to-day, each of which countries
maintains several Universities, each with a vigorous
school of Modern History.
The conditions, I know, are totally different ; and
the more decisive of those conditions are beyond the
power of any university, and even of any government,
to alter ; but some of the existing obstacles are more
amenable to treatment and may be removed in time.
Among such is the fact that London University has
few scholarships and few exhibitions to give for
Modern History, while older establishments count
these attractions by the score and even by the hundred;
so that a London youth with a taste for history is
pretty sure to be tempted elsewhere. A second
obstacle, which has been painfully brought home to
my mind by six years' experience as a Matriculation
Examiner, is the fact that the most promising history
candidates almost invariably fail in elementary mathe-
five candidates, of whom one was placed in the first, three in the second,
and one in the third, class. In 1906 the number of candidates increased
to nine, of whom two were placed in the first, five in the second, and
two in the third class. There will probably be further increases in 1907
and 1908. It seems unnecessary to speak of External Students ; for no
school of History can exist where there is no University instruction, and
no access to proper libraries or other sources of information.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 265
matics or in some other uncongenial subject ; l and
a third consists in the fact that no one can pass the
intermediate examination in Arts without a knowledge
of Greek,2 a prohibition which warns off the history
course most of those who have not learnt Greek at
school ; and those who have not learnt Greek at school
inevitably constitute no small proportion of the under-
graduates of London University.
But, whatever the causes, the fact remains that
Modern History is at present the Cinderella, perhaps I
should say one of the somewhat numerous Cinderellas
of London University who await the advent of some
fairy prince to raise them to their proper station in
life ; and, roughly speaking, there is no such thing at
the present moment as a History School in the
University of London.3 The question then arises
whether there should or should not be such a school.
Well, I suppose that that question is settled for us
1 The remedy for this is not easy to prescribe. The difficulty, which
is partly natural and inevitable, is magnified by the lack of guidance
from which candidates suffer. Often they have no one to point out their
weak subjects and make them concentrate on those ; and there should be
greater facility in the communications between examiners and teachers, a
facility which has been established for the higher examinations on the
Internal side, but is lacking for Matriculation and the External side.
3 This has now been altered; an Arts candidate must take two
languages at least, of which one must be either Latin or Greek. Any
candidate may take both, but they are not compulsory. Historical
students can now take those two indispensable modern languages, French
and German, which was practically impossible before ; and professors of
Greek are no longer compelled to turn their Intermediate classes into
Fourth Forms.
3 This is happily no longer true ; there are over half a dozen students
doing post-graduate research in Modern History, and some have already
published original work of no slight value. One was awarded the Royal
Historical Society's Alexander Prize last year (1906).
266 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
here in a vague theoretical way by the definition of
University College as ' a place of teaching and research
in which wide academic culture is secured by the
variety of the subjects taught in different faculties.'
For I imagine that no one would exclude Modern
History from that variety of subjects ; and I assume
that the University of London will not be content with
a narrower ideal than University College. Supposing,
however, that a young man were to come and say, ' It is
all very well to talk about academic culture, but what
is the use of history ? what tangible advantages can
you hold out if I take up the study of history, spend
weary hours in attending your lectures, and precious
money in paying your fees ? ' Well, I suppose it would
not be in accordance with professorial practice or with
professional etiquette, but I should be inclined to reply,
taking the words in the current conventional sense,
that history is of absolutely no use whatever. Yet it is
precisely on that assumption — that history is of no use
whatever — that I would base its claim to a prominent
place in the curricula of every University under the
sun. It is of no use according to the popular notion
of education ; because education is vulgarly thought
to be valuable mainly, if not solely, as a means of
increasing our individual or our national wealth ; and
it is to be feared that, if education were to be stripped
of that glamour and of its theological delights, there
would be little popular interest left in the subject. At
any rate, from a point of view of those who regard
education as a path to prosperity or even to moderate
comfort, the study of history holds out only the
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 267
feeblest attractions. One of the most brilliant and
popular of English historians, James Anthony Froude,
declared that he would not bring up a son as an
historian, because the pecuniary rewards for the writing
of history did not suffice for even a modest living.
Another historian recently dead, more learned if less
brilliant than Froude, for writing one of the greatest of
English histories received less per hour than the wage of
an unskilled manual labourer. Gibbon could not have
written his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire nor
Macaulay his History of England if they had not
possessed independent means ; and the first requisite
for an historian in England is neither skill nor industry,
neither knowledge of documents nor a faculty for
turning them into literature, but the command of
financial resources independent of those which can be
derived from the writing of history. These are the
giants of the world of history ; as for the lesser folk, I
am told they eke out a scanty subsistence by trouncing
each other's books in the newspaper press, and spoiling
each other's market by selling their review copies below
cost price. One of them not long ago published a
book at his own expense, and after a time went to
inquire how many copies had been sold. The
publisher, a humane man, tried to parry the question ;
but the author was persistent and at length extorted
the answer ' Four.' ' Four,' he exclaimed, ' four !
Well, I made my family buy three, but who in the
world can have bought the fourth ? ' There is a
pathetic side to the picture. I have heard tell of an
historical student who has spent years on a piece of
268 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
research without hope or desire of profit, and now that
it is completed is unable to give it to the world because
he cannot afford to pay for its publication himself and
cannot persuade a publisher to take the risk. I do not
refer, of course, to the authors of school books, which
are often a re-hash of old facts flavoured only with
an original spice of error, and are generally popular
and profitable in inverse ratio to their merits.
I cannot therefore hold out the study of history as
an easy or pleasant method of making a fortune. It
is in fact of little use as technical instruction ; but is
that fact a bar to its use as a means of liberal educa-
tion ? I think not. For it seems to me that there is
a deep and vital distinction between technical instruc-
tion and education in the true sense of the word ; and
the tendency to ignore and gloze over that difference
is one of the greatest perils in the path of our
Universities to-day. With technical instruction a
University has primarily nothing to do; its main
object is to educate. It should limit itself to the
ascertainment and propagation of knowledge ; the
application of that knowledge to industrial and manu-
facturing processes lies outside its proper sphere and
should be left to other agencies. For surely the whole
justification of endowments is this : that they enable
professors and others to pursue knowledge and investi-
gate problems quite irrespective of the question whether
the results of their researches are convertible into terms
of hard cash or not. The application of this ascer-
tained knowledge should be a matter for commercial
or industrial enterprise which would bring its own
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 269
reward. One of the worst features in our higher
educational circles is that the true raison (fetre of
endowments is constantly being lost sight of, that
they come to be regarded as a right and not as a
trust and a privilege, as property without conditions
and duties attached to it, and that the leisure which
its possession affords is employed not in the pursuit of
unremunerative research but in the acquisition of gain.
But what is the difference between technical instruc-
tion and education proper? Perhaps it is something
like this : the function and object of technical instruction
is, for instance, to make a brewer a better brewer ; the
function of education is to make him a better man.
Technical instruction regards the means of living,
education regards the end of life. It seeks to make
men, not money, to develop to the utmost possible
extent the faculties, mental, moral, and spiritual, of
mankind, and to enable them not merely to exist, but
to live the fullest life of which they are capable. It
used to be said in the old days of the struggle for the
extension of elementary education and of the franchise,
that no amount of education and no number of votes
would enable the ploughman to drive a straighter
furrow or the dock-labourer to heave a heavier load.
It was the function of the ploughman to follow the
plough and the cobbler to stick to his last. To which
it was replied that the ploughman does not Hve in
order to plough, but ploughs in order to live ; and that
hard labour is not an end in itself, but only a means.
The old fallacies still survive, and popular indifference
to education, as distinct from technical instruction, is
2/0 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
largely due to the idea that no amount of it will enable
a man to add one cubit to his financial stature. But
surely it is no part of the business of a University to
lend itself to errors like these. A University should
set its face against the encroachments and usurpations
of technical instruction. The State has more than once
taken upon itself to raise the limit of age at which
children may be taken from school and put to earning
a livelihood ; in the same way a University should
endeavour to postpone, not accelerate, the limit of age
at which bread-and-butter considerations come in to
dominate, narrow, and check the growth of the youthful
mind. Not that I wish to depreciate technical instruc-
tion ; the more of it the better — in its place. It is
excellent to have a Charlottenburg, provided that your
Charlottenburg does not usurp the place of a University.1
It is excellent to have technical instruction, provided it
does not oust liberal education ; it is excellent that
ploughmen should be taught to plough and dairymaids
to milk, provided that such instruction is not allowed
to take the place of education. I know that there are
difficulties in the way of liberal education here ; the
practical as well as the ideal must always be borne
in mind, and the undergraduate of London has on an
average to think of earning a living earlier than the
1 The safest way of guarding against such encroachments would be to
place both under the same control. At any rate to establish in London a
vast Technical Institute, side by side and independent of the University,
and to give it the power of granting degrees, would simply be the
destruction of the newly created teaching University of London. The
Charlottenburg should be a supplement to, and not a rival of, the Uni-
versity ; and a University qualification should be made compulsory for all
Charlottenburg students.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 271
undergraduate elsewhere ; but that is an evil to be
diminished and not a good to be encouraged.
Another cause of popular indifference to education
and comparative zeal for technical instruction is the
impression that England is being outstripped by her
rivals, and particularly by Germany and the United
States, in the race for commercial prosperity, because
she has in the past, and does still in the present, stand
too much on the ancient ways, and devotes to liberal
education the time and energy which her competitors
spend in technical instruction and in the application of
science to commerce and industry. This assumption,
I believe, is entirely erroneous. Germany at any rate
does not neglect higher education because it is zealous
in the cause of technical instruction. The Germans
are at least as efficient in pure scholarship as they are
in mixed mathematics or in applied science. Take, for
example, the University of Berlin ; I am told by my
scientific colleagues that that University is perhaps the
best equipped University in the world from a scientific
point of view, and one would therefore hardly select
it as the type of University in which the study of Arts
was the most highly developed. Yet what do we find ?
Berlin has its six professors of Modern History, and,
perhaps even more important, its professor of the
methods of historical research ; and there is scarcely
a University in Germany which does not possess two
or three professors of Modern History ; that appears
to be the minimum without which a German University
dare not look the world in the face. America is not
far behind ; Chicago, I believe, has seven professors of
272 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
Modern History, and for an elucidation of the most
important problems in English Constitutional History
one has to send one's pupils to books written and
published under the auspices of American Universities.
Nor is the German interest in Modern History confined
to Universities ; nearly every State has its royal or
ducal commission for the publication of its historical
materials, and the same object is energetically pursued
by numbers of local associations ; most districts have
their verein or gesellschaft for the purposes of re-
search ; and practically no one in Germany dreams of
giving or seeking a doctor's degree unless his thesis
is based upon the study of portions of unpublished
material. In Germany there are to-day some two
hundred regular periodical publications exclusively
devoted to historical research ; in England there is
one. Now I do not fancy all the German's methods ;
what he has won in intensity of gaze he may have
lost in broadness of outlook ; his zeal may not always
be tempered with wisdom, but of his zeal the facts I
have mentioned leave no doubt. And they might be
multiplied indefinitely, but I have said enough to show
that there is no inherent incompatibility between the
keenest pursuit of efficiency in commerce and industry
and the keenest devotion to pure scholarship ; a nation
or a community is not bound to choose between the
two. Rather their existence side by side — both
developed to such an extent as they are in Germany
— indicates that there may be some subtle connection
between the two, and suggests that what makes the
Germans such formidable rivals is not their preference
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 273
of technical instruction to a liberal education, but the
intellectual keenness which enables them to pursue
both with success.
These facts, then, show that foreign Universities are
not blind to the value of history as a subject of educa-
tion. Testimony as to that value is, indeed, super-
fluous ; it is not disputed that you cannot understand
what man is to-day unless you know what he was
yesterday and the day before, that the past has pro-
duced the present, and is the only guide for the future.
Down at the bottom — even in London — we admit the
value of history, though at times we dissemble our
appreciation, and at times express it in curious ways.
Some three years ago a committee was formed in
London for the purpose of establishing a Chair of
Modern History at Cape Town in South Africa, and
it was urged with some force and some truth that it
was of the highest importance that the future citizens
of the Empire in South Africa should be made ac-
quainted with at least the outlines of the history of
their own and of other countries. I believe a fair sum
was collected for this excellent project ; but the odd
thing was that it did not seem to have occurred to
any one that charity begins at home, and that if it was
essential for the youth of Cape Town to know some-
thing of history, it was, at least, as essential for the six
millions who live at the heart of the Empire. For
when, about the same time, an effort was made to
establish a University Professorship of History in
London, in memory of the late Bishop Creighton, the
magnificent sum of .£300 was all that was realised, a
S
274 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
sum just sufficient to pay one lecturer £ 100 a year for
three years, which have now expired.1 That fiasco2
seems to have damped the ardour of those who hoped
to see a School of History established in London
University; and I have been told that there is no
demand for history teaching in London, and that it is
of no use for the University to appoint teachers or
professors until such a demand has been created.
Admitting, then, that we have no History School at
present, and assuming that there ought to be such a
school, we must next ask what prospect there is of its
ever taking shape. And here it is necessary to dis-
tinguish between an undergraduate and a post-graduate
school of Modern History. I have already alluded to
various obstacles in the way of an undergraduate
school of Modern History, the rival attractions of
numerous and substantial scholarships and exhibitions
elsewhere, the enforcement of Greek in the Inter-
mediate Examination in Arts, and of other subjects at
Matriculation. To these must be added the somewhat
inadequate provision for teaching at various schools of
the University, the difficulty of arranging intercollegiate
courses, owing to the geographical distribution of the
various centres,3 the want of good libraries, and the
1 Another ^300 was subsequently collected, and Mr. Passmore
Edwards gave a similar sum to found a second lectureship. Both are
associated with the School of Economics, and even they depend for
existence to some extent on their appeal to the economic rather than the
educational motive.
2 The attempt was revived last year (1906) with no better success.
3 This difficulty has not been found insuperable. The present writer
has had at his lectures students from King's, Bedford, and Westfield
Colleges ; and has sent pupils of his own to all colleges from which they
were not debarred by sex.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 275
necessity of keeping down the standard of the Honours
Examination to the level attainable by External
students dwelling in lonely villages inaccessible to any
culture except that which comes by post. In all these
respects London has had to contend with infinitely
greater difficulties than other Universities. Yet they
are not insuperable, and they do not absolutely forbid
the creation of an undergraduate school of Modern
History. Granting that many of the best students are,
and always will be, drawn off elsewhere, surely there is
a sufficient residuum among the six or seven millions
residing within the University radius, most of whom
could not, even with the help of scholarships, spend
three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge. London,
it is said, engages about fifteen hundred new teachers
for its schools in every year ; surely some of these
should have undergone a course of University instruc-
tion in Modern History, a course which, for the vast
majority of them, is only possible within the London
radius. There are, moreover, a few scholarships in
the University of London ; and it is a matter for
regret that the very existence of these scholarships
appears to be unknown alike to teachers and to pupils.
With regard to books and libraries, there is now a fair
nucleus for a University Library at South Kensington ; l
and there is a most admirable library here in this
1 The difficulty about the location of the University buildings at South
Kensington is their inaccessibility to London undergraduates. Youths
who live in South Kensington go to Oxford or Cambridge, if they go to
any University at all. If the richest city in the world really cared a brass
button for its University, it would establish and endow it on an unequalled
site now vacant in Aldwych.
276 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
College, the advantages of which are not sufficiently
appreciated, although it has been thrown open to every
Internal student of the University, whether he or she
be a member of University College or not. Finally,
the differentiation of the External and the Internal
Examinations for the B.A. Honours Degree opens
up at least the possibility of raising the standard of
the Internal Degree to a considerably higher level. It
has, I know, been suggested that, owing to the paucity
of candidates and the expense of conducting two sets
of Examinations, it may be necessary to once more
amalgamate the two. There is no objection to that
step, provided that the External Examination is raised
to the level of the Internal, and not the Internal
reduced to that of the External, and provided that
there be no ruling-out of subjects on the ground that
Little Peddlington does not afford adequate facilities
for their study. A University purchases increased
numbers at too great a cost when it lowers its standard
in order to increase its size.
I turn to a vastly more promising topic — a post-
graduate school of Historical Research in London ;
and here the stars in their courses have fought in our
favour ; here we have a monopoly of advantages which
no other city in the whole Empire can boast. To
begin with, at present there is no competition ; for
there is no real school of research in History in any
English University.1 Not that competition would
matter ; for the special opportunities which London
1 An effort is being made to remedy this by the Regius Professor of
Modern History at Oxford, in the face of great opposition.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 277
enjoys should enable it — if it is wise — to outdistance
its rivals with ease. Undergraduates may be tempted
in that and in this and in every direction ; but
graduates who aspire to research in Modern History
are compelled to resort to London. For here in the
Record Office, in the British Museum, and in other
Government Departments are stored the vast bulk of
materials on which they must base their work, if their
research is to reach that standard which other countries
have set, and which we now have a right to demand.
It is true that the Bodleian has considerable manu-
script collections unused, untouched, unseen ; it is true
that there are archives at various noblemen's seats,
like those of Lord Salisbury at Hatfield, or those of
the Duke of Portland at Welbeck, and of course the
materials for local history must always be sought in
various localities. But from the point of view of
national history all these are a drop in the ocean of
records existing in London. Of course, some of these
have been printed or calendared, and thus made acces-
sible in any respectable library ; and, indeed, I read in
a review the other day the statement that the materials
for the history of the sixteenth century had been
worked over so often and scrutinised so closely that
nothing now remained to be learned or to be said on
the subject. That only illustrates the unfathomable
ignorance of reviewers — I speak as a fairly frequent
reviewer myself. For, as a matter of fact, no human
eye has so much as glanced at all the materials for the
history of that century, and the same may be said with
even more certainty for every succeeding age. To
278 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
mention one class of material, — the despatches of
English ambassadors abroad : those extending from
1509 to 1579 have indeed been calendared under the
direction of the Master of the Rolls. But, except for
these seventy years, they remain for the most part
unprinted and unread ; and even when calendared it
takes about a generation for their contents to be
digested, and at least two generations for the truth
that is in them to filter down into the history that is
taught in our schools and Universities. Of the extant
materials for English History not one-tenth has yet
been calendared or printed, and the whole of English
history, as it is written and read or known, is like an
edifice built on foundations which do not occupy one-
tenth of the possible area. Here is a void clamouring
to be filled ; herein lies the unique opportunity for a
post-graduate school of research in London University.
Circumstances, too, seem to mark out beforehand
the lines on which this post-graduate school should
run. As the materials existing in London are mainly
concerned with English History, it is obvious that this
school should be mainly, though not exclusively, a
school of research in English History. But even within
the limits of English History there are certain subjects
which pre-eminently demand our attention ; and first
and foremost among these I place the subject of Naval
History. For, considering that this Empire is the
greatest naval power the world has ever known, con-
sidering it has had the longest and most glorious
naval history on record, considering further that it has
been built up and rests upon sea power, that its very
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 279
existence therefore depends to a large extent upon the
true interpretation and appreciation of the lessons of
naval history, it is surely an astounding fact that there
is not, and never has been, a professorship or a lecture-
ship or a readership in naval history in any University
whatsoever within the limits of the British dominions.
Fortunately there has been of late years no great
naval war to test how much the nation may have
risked by this neglect ; but it is not a fact of which we
can be proud that we are even now indebted to the
individual enterprise and researches of a distinguished
American author for the best exposition of the in-
fluence of sea power upon history. In London alone
can this need be adequately supplied, for here in the
Record Office we have, in enormous masses, materials
of every description, hundreds of volumes of des-
patches from Admirals in command on the various
stations, letters to them from the Home government,
proceedings of courts-martial, and logs of ships record-
ing the individual history of most of the vessels of
which the British Navy has from time to time been
composed.
Closely connected with naval history is a study for
which the present provision is equally insufficient. I
am no great admirer myself of what J. R. Green used
to call the ' drum and trumpet ' style of history ; but
at the same time no nation can with impunity neglect
the teachings of the history of war ; and, indeed, I
suppose it is generally admitted that a better apprecia-
tion of those lessons on the part of the nation and of
its rulers in recent years might have saved us some
280 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
thousands of lives and some millions of money. I
know that we, as a people, hold the student and the
theorist cheap compared with what we call the
practical man ; but we often forget that the man
who won the Franco-Prussian War was firstly a
student and a theorist, and that Napoleon himself
knew almost by heart every great campaign recorded
in history.
A third topic which would claim the particular
attention of a school of research in this University
would naturally be the history of London itself. I
stated above that a moderate-sized city or town in
Germany, or for that matter in France as well, would
blush if it did not possess some association for the
study and publication of its own historical records. I
know of no such society in London ; perhaps the
subject is too vast. And when I speak of the history
of London, I would not exclude the most recent times;
for a course of study of London history should be the
first introduction to the scientific investigation of its
present-day problems of local government, the vastest
problems of the kind with which human intellect has
ever been called upon to deal.
A fourth branch of history of which we should
naturally make a speciality is the history of the nine-
teenth century, partly because that vital period is
deliberately cut from the historical curricula of other
Universities,1 and used to be universally ignored in
schools ; so that of no period is the ordinary British
citizen so ignorant as of that which immediately pre-
1 This defect, again, has been remedied to some extent.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 281
ceded, and therefore most powerfully influenced, the
age in which he lives. The other day I set a question
in the Matriculation Examination upon the origin and
growth of the idea of Imperial Federation. Incredible
as the fact may seem, about half the candidates who
attempted that question had not the ghost of a notion
what Imperial Federation meant ; many thought it
was equivalent to Colonial self-government, and at
last I came to regard it as a sign of unusual in-
telligence when a candidate stated that in 1867
Imperial Federation was granted to Canada, and in
1900 to the Australian Colonies. Yet Dr. Arnold of
Rugby regarded contemporary history as more im-
portant than either ancient or modern, and in fact
superior to it by all the superiority of the end to the
means. In France, such is the weight attached to the
study of our own times, that there is a specially
organised course of contemporary history with expert
teachers and appropriate text-books ; and London
University never did a wiser thing than when it
extended the modern history of its curricula down to
the death of Queen Victoria.
With all these departments there would naturally be
associated competent instruction in the meaning and
use of original sources such as hitherto English
scholars have had to pick up for themselves or go
to the £cole des Chartes at Paris to learn. The other
day I was asked by a history tutor of twenty years'
standing (not in this University), ' Can you tell me
what an original authority is ? ' and a University
magazine recently described a living scholar as an
282 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
original authority on the history of Ancient Greece !
Yet the definition of an original authority is the most
elementary axiom of historical research, and the basis
of all historical criticism.
These are some of the measures which might be
taken to build up a school of Modern History worthy
of the capital of the Empire and of its University. But
the function of a University is not exhausted when it
has collected and trained a number of youths in
various arts and sciences. That is its internal duty,
its duty to itself; it has also an external duty to the
nation which does (or should) provide it with funds.
' It is not my business to make chemists/ an eminent
professor of chemistry is reported as saying, ' but to
make chemistry.' It will not be the business of a
School of History merely to make historians, but to
discover and spread historical truth. A University
should be a focus of national intellect, and a source of
national inspiration ; and it fulfils its function badly if
it does not help to expand the national mind. Cen-
turies ago there used to be sung a jingle to the effect
that when Oxford draws knife, England is soon at
strife, a boast that Oxford stood not so much upon the
ancient ways as in the van of national movement. It
can hardly be said, I fear, that English Universities
have maintained their hegemony of the national
intellect ; they certainly do not contribute so much
to our intellectual prestige as German Universities do
to that of their Fatherland ; and it has often been a
subject of comment abroad that such men as Darwin,
Huxley, and Spencer should never have occupied
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 283
Chairs in an English University, as though there were a
great gulf growing, if not fixed, between the Universities
and the leaders of the nation. That reproach does not
of course lie at the door of London, and one may hope
that, when London has its properly appointed staff of
professors and teachers, it will do something to recover
the lost national lead.
One at least of the services which our History School
might render its day and generation would be to
broaden the meaning and increase the uses of history.
For history should record the whole life and not
merely the political life of nations ; it should devote as
much space to the evolution of thought as to the
development of events. A hint of the way in which
it might be studied and written is given in a book by
an able Cambridge historian entitled The Annals of
Politics and Culture, where on one page is recorded
the progress of politics and on the other the simul-
taneous advancement of science, of art, and of literature;
a more elaborate hint may be found in the Dictionary
of National Biography > where as much space is given to
Newton as to Marlborough, and twice as much to
Shakespeare as to Queen Elizabeth ; and if there be
any one here with abundant means and a few score
years of time to spare, he might employ them worse
than in re-writing those sixty-six volumes in the form
of a national history ; he would be able to trace not
merely the growth of the British people in politics, but
their achievements in arts, philosophy, science, com-
merce and industry. Seriously, I should like to see
a history which gave as much space, for instance, to
284 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
the story of the foundation of the Royal Society as to
that of the Popish Plot, as much to the discoveries of
Joseph Priestley as to the speeches of Edmund Burke.
For in this way history could be made profitable not
merely to the politician and to the publicist, but to the
philosopher, the scientist, and the physician.
Further, our School of History might perform not
merely an academic but a national service in raising
the standard of taste and criticism. I referred above
to the inadequate appreciation which makes the work
of so many scholars disheartening and unremunera-
tive. It is not that there is no popular interest in
history ; the hundreds of books on historical subjects
which are published every year are sufficient evidence
of this. But it is because that popular taste is ill-
educated and crude. No one writes treatises on
Helium or Engineering without some sort of acquaint-
ance with the subject, but every one thinks that he or
she can write history and biography without any
preliminary training or any specific research ; and the
public will buy any book if the author possesses a
handle to his or her name. A well-known man of
letters and politician once asked me how much a
certain scholar received for a certain book. I happened
to know and told him. ' What,' he exclaimed, ' do you
mean to say that they insulted a man like that with the
offer of such a sum ? ' I said that scholars were often
insulted that way. * Well,' he said, ' let me give you a
piece of advice ; before you write a book, get into
Parliament, or still better get made a cabinet minister;
and I guarantee that the publishers will pay you ten
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 285
times that amount for any book you may write on
whatever subject you choose.'
Now I may be told that it is impossible to do the
things which I have suggested without help and funds,
which at present the University can scarcely hope to
command. Nothing of course can be done by sitting
still and sighing at the magnitude of the task.
Perhaps not much will be done until London finds
legs of its own and dispenses with borrowed crutches ;
but I do not think the question of funds is fatal, and I
am sure there is no greater delusion than that the
quality of work depends on the amount which is paid
for it. Milton got £10 for Paradise Lost\ it would
have been no better a poem if he had received £10,000;
and if some of our latter-day novelists received £10,
instead of £10,000, their work could not possibly be
any worse. There are scholars to-day doing historical
research of a very high order for nothing more than
the love of the thing ; and some of them would be
glad to give their services to the University for a
price which in other professions might seem absurd.
Their appointments need not be permanent, for fixity
of tenure is often more pleasant than stimulating to
the tenant ; and you can get vastly more and vastly
better work by paying a yearly succession of lecturers
£100, than you can by giving one man £1000 a year
for life. At any rate, nothing has done so much in
recent years for historical teaching at Oxford as the
establishment of the annual Ford Lectureship. For
that lectureship the services have been secured of men
like the late Dr. Gardiner, the late Sir Leslie Stephen,
286 FACTORS IN MODERN HISTORY
and the late Professor Maitland ; and the result has
been in each case to produce not merely a course
of lectures, but a book of the highest historical value.
Something similar might be done at London for even a
smaller sum ; l and two things at least we can do
without any money at all. We can raise the standard
of London degrees in history until they rank with or
above the highest ; and we can insist that no doctorate
be granted except for work which shall be no mere
juvenile essays, but solid contributions to historical
knowledge based upon original research among pub-
lished and unpublished sources.
One last idea I should like to mention ; it is perhaps
the most fantastic of all, for certainly it could not be
carried into effect without financial support. I mean
the idea that London should have its own University
Press.2 A scholarly but somewhat cynical friend of
mine says that if he had a fortune, which he hasn't,
and if, having this fortune, he felt disposed to part with
it — which he certainly would not — he would not endow
professorships, thinking that perhaps professors even
now sometimes get too much and do too little ; he
would not endow libraries, although, or perhaps be-
cause, he is a librarian himself; but he would endow
printing presses ; for by that means alone could much
of the research now fruitlessly done be made known
to the world at large. It would possess a further
enormous advantage for London University; we
1 The attempt is to be made for this year (1907) ; but the funds only
come out of a precarious income ; and there is no permanency about it.
2 This is under consideration in various forms ; but capital is as usual
the rock upon which it must be built — or split.
THE STUDY OF HISTORY 287
should not be hampered by the constant plea that such
and such a subject must not be prescribed for examina-
tion or curricula because there are no good books or
editions dealing with it, or else that those books are
not within the means of the average student, for then
we could always provide our own editions and text-
books.
Now, it is often made a reproach to young men,
that they dream dreams and see visions. But if it is
commonly a reproach, it becomes once and again a
privilege ; for a vision may be one of the future and
a dream does sometimes come true. And one of the
dreams which I am sure will some day come true is this :
that as we are citizens of no mean city, so shall we be
graduates, undergraduates, fellow-workers in no mean
university, a university every school of which shall
focus knowledge, radiate truth, and help to illumine the
national mind.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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Pollard, Albert Frederick
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