STAR OF EMPIRE A STUDY OF BRITAIN AS A WORLD POWER 1485-1945

Star of Empire

A Study of

BRITAIN

AS A WORLD POWER
1485-1945

WILLIAM B. WILLCOX

NEW YORK

ALFRED A. KNOPF
1950

INTRODUCTION

PAGES that follow are an attempt to interpret the story of
-L modern Britain. They are not primarily an attempt to tell the
story; that has been done in a number of excellent textbooks. The
salient facts must of course be given in order to be interpreted, but
my interest is in the meaning behind them. They were produced by
complex forces of ideas or personality, economics or geography
and the significance of the story lies in die forces. These were seldom
clear to any particular generation that had to deal with them; they
are not yet wholly clear, and the effort to read their meaning be-
comes progressively more difficult as the story advances toward the
present. But meaning is there, and it is important

Although I am not attempting to prove any thesis about British
history, I am attempting to develop certain ideas that I believe are
fundamental to it They explain the emphases throughout the book,
and the reader ought in fairness to know of them in advance. One
idea is that religion had a profound influence on British develop-
ment at least into the nineteenth century; hence my stress in the
first chapter on the nature of the Tudor church as the matrix of the
future. A second is that until the Victorian era the English system
of local government by amateurs conditioned the functioning of na-
tional government A third (which should be a truism) is that Brit-
ain has developed in response to outside stimuli, especially Euro-
pean, and that in consequence her history is inseparable from the
history of Europe. A fourth, derivative from the third, is that her
policy has in the long run been governed by the strategic demands
of her peculiar and highly specialized forms of power. A fifth is that
since the time of the American Revolution which was a much
more superficial schism than it seemed to be Britain and the
United States have been drawing together again toward the entente
of the present day. None of these ideas is original. But in sum they
will explain, I hope, why the book seemed worth writing.

I do not believe that all historical periods are of equal importance
for the present, and I have made no attempt to treat them equally.
The crucial nature of the Puritan Revolution explains why the

vii

Introduction

who experienced them, he is beyond the range of documentation.
His findings can be no more than provisional, and they are peculiarly
open to his own subjective bias the bias that is the historian's
equivalent of original sin, something he deplores in himself but
knows he will never be rid of. Bias expresses itself not only in the
handling of topics but in the choice of them. Why do I discuss
Burke and not Jeremy Bentham, or the Whiggism of 1688 without
mentioning Locke? My only answer is that I feel free from the text-
book-writer's obligation to touch on virtually everything, and that
free selection is necessarily arbitrary.

Another and more serious danger of interpretative history is that
the writer does not know enough. In order to interpret soundly he
ought to be familiar with every aspect of an enormous subject.
Ought he therefore to resemble that fabulous British scholar "whose
field ^was history and whose foible was omniscience"? If so, this
book should never have been written, for it has led me into areas
where I am all too conscious of my ignorance. I have done what I
could to remedy it. For the rest I can only plead that the profes-
sional conscience, if given free rein, makes cowards of us all.

I am indebted to the editors of the American Historical Review
and the Yale Review for allowing me to incorporate material from
articles of mine, and to Professor Edward Mead Earle for reading
the last two chapters of my manuscript and making many valuable
suggestions. I am grateful to my publishers, first for inducing me to
write the book, and then for helpfulness and encouragement during
its composition; and to the University of Michigan for accelerating
its progress by granting me a sabbatical leave of absence. Lastly I
am under a deep obligation to my wife. Her patience is equaled by
her critical sense, and she has contributed so much to these pages
that they are in effect a joint enterprise.

W. B. W.
Arm Arbor, Michigan.

October 3, 1949

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: SEEDS OF GREATNESS
1485-1603

\

I The Island Peoples 3

II The Tudor Setting 7

III The Two Henrys 15

IV Catholic and Protestant 23

V The Religious Seesaw 29
VI The Elizabethan Defensive 38

VII "Confident from Foreign Purposes" 45

CHAPTER TWO: THE PASSING OF TUDOR ENGLAND
1603-1660

I The Advent of the Stuarts 50
II The Pedantic King 53

III The Breach with Parliament 61

IV The King Alone 68

V The Fall of the Monarchy 75

VI "Sword Government" 87

CHAPTER THREE: THE TRIUMPH OF THE OLIGARCHY

1660-1763

I The Merry Monarch 98

II Tory and Whig 104

III The Conservative Revolution 109

IV The Duel with Louis XIV 116
V The Duel of Tory and Whig 122

VI The Whig Ascendancy 127

VII The Second Phase of the Duel with France 133

VIII Victory Overseas 137

xi

Contents

VI Conquest in Africa 286
VII Forces of Reform 296

VIII The Diplomatic Revolution 300

CHAPTER SEVEN: GEORGIAN BRITAIN
1906-1932

I The Socialist Experiment 307

II The Road to War 312

III From Blitzkrieg to Deadlock 320

IV Victory and Versailles 330

V London, Geneva, and Washington 338
VI The British Commonwealth 343

VII Domestic Change 347

CHAPTER EIGHT: SLEEP AND WAKING

1932-1945

I The Background of Foreign Policy 352

II The Undeclared War 361

III The Nazi Offensive in the West 367

IV Counteroffensive 373
V The New World 378

VI Crystal-Gazing 387

Bibliographical Note 395
Index follows page 399

Xlll

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

nent; they alone have been free to devote their full energies to com-
mercial development, emigration, and conquest overseas. Their
imperial greatness, in short, derives in large part from the fact that
the English -were thrown back upon their island in the fifteenth cen-
tury by the power of France.

When the House of Tudor came to the English throne in 1485,
this blessing was still in disguise. Defeat in war abroad had been
followed by war at home a vicious series of feuds that history has
sweetly disguised as the Wars of the Roses. The aftermath was such
demoralization of people and government as England had not seen
since the twelfth century. The legal and political system seemed to
be breaking down, and public order to be giving way to chaos. The
English were at loggerheads with the other British peoples, and a
unified state for the island of Great Britain let alone for Great
Britain and Ireland was a still-distant dream. Little chance ap-
peared that the islanders would compose their own differences, and
less that they had in them the strength for expansion.

The great future problem in the interrelations of the British peo-
ples was already taking form. The Tudors claimed sovereignty over
Ireland, as their predecessors had done, by virtue of a conquest in
the Norman period. But despite four centuries of intermittent ef-
fort English authority scarcely extended beyond the narrow limits
of the Pale, with its capital at Dublin. The reason was part of the
enduring tragedy of Anglo-Irish relations. The English world was so
different from the Irish, not only iir race and language, but in law
and economics, that the average English administrator had no more
understanding of the Irish clans and their system of land tenure
than he did of their language; to him they were in every sense be-
yond the Pale. They retaliated with a hostility that scarcely disposed
their overlords to know them better, and that would have thrown
the English back into the sea years before if the chieftains had not
hated each other more than they hated the foreigner. Because they
were unable to combine, the English had little difficulty in carrying
out the first half of the Roman maxim, divide and rule.

The second half was another matter. Ireland was geographically
too near England to be ignored, but it was too far away to be con-
quered and held with the means available to the English state of
tiiat period. Governmental resources were, by modern standards, un-
believably meager. The machinery of power was correspondingly

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

tures in Ireland and Scotland. The conquerors held their new prin-
cipality much as the Romans had done, by a series of castles along
the border and the coasts, and left the tribesmen of the interior
largely unmolested in their mountains. The highlanders periodically
swept eastward on raids into the Vale of Severn, to loot the fat-
ness of its farming lands, and life on the Welsh Marches was as pre-
carious as on the Scottish. But rebellion, as distinct from raids, had
ended more than half a century before the Tudor era, when
Henry IV and his warrior son had stamped out the rising of Owen
Glendower. Since then English influence had expanded steadily in
Wales, until the moment was nearly ripe for a political fusion of the
two. The actual fusion was achieved in 1536 by the great-grandson
of a Welsh country gentleman, Henry VIII of the House of Tudor.

II The Tudor Setting

AT its accession the position of the new dynasty seemed far from
promising. The Tudor right to the throne was questionable; in law
it rested on a devious descent from Edward III through a female
line, and in fact it rested on success in war. The last of the House
of York, Richard III, had governed more despotically than even the
Yorkists could endure, and within two years he had been defeated
and killed in battle by the only pretender strong enough to chal-
lenge him, Henry Tudor. Henry was thereupon accepted by the
nation, less of right than of necessity, and the Wars of the Roses
were over. But the new king was confronted with an enormous task
of reconstruction. Within England the people were exhausted by
fighting abroad and at home; private quarrels were rife and rebel-
lion endemic; the prestige and power of central government were at
low ebb. Elsewhere in the islands the Irish were unsubdued, and
the Scots maintained their menacing independence. From abroad
the great powers of Europe eyed~the troubled waters shrewdly, cal-
culating when and where they could fish to best advantage.

Henry's England, however, had deep sources of strength on which
to draw. The people, whatever their surface difficulties, were well
equipped by history and geography for the new age dawning in Eu-
rope. Their island home had molded their society, which was both
elastic and tough, and their insularity had largely freed them from
the threat of overseas invasion. They had consequently needed the

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

geniture: the eldest son of a peer inherited the title and the lands,
while his younger brothers, who remained commoners at law, were
likely to grow up as country gentlemen. The burgesses -were an
equally undefined group, recruited from above and below, and they
were also closely tied to the gentry. The tie was in great part eco-
nomic, although it had its social side. The mainspring of the national
economy in the late Middle Ages was the wool trade. Sheep-raising
was the most lucrative use to which land could be put in many
parts of England, and the marketing of wool brought wealth to the
towns. Inevitably, therefore, the landowner and the merchant were
brought together by a community of interest, and their business re-
lations were often cemented by a marriage alliance. The English
middle class was much more than a bourgeoisie. Some of its roots
were urban, others deeply planted in the land, and it derived its vi-
tality in equal measure from both.

Its political importance was already out of all proportion to its
size. The monarchy had long been attempting to weaken the power
of the aristocracy by transferring the work of local government to
the gentry and burgesses. Much was still to be done by the Tudors,
but already the principal royal agents in the counties and towns
were unpaid amateurs of the middle class. Because they were ama-
teurs they had to acquire their administrative experience and knowl-
edge of the law as they went along. Because they were unpaid they
had to work for the king in such time as they could spare from su-
pervising the tenantry or managing the shop. Behind them stood no
tangible force no police or army worth the name, nothing but the
prestige of a distant king. On that and on their own skill depended
their capacity to get obedience from neighbors whom they could
not coerce. Whenever local opinion was solidly opposed to the pol-
icy of the crown, that policy could not be carried out. The royal
agent, whether squire or townsman, could not flout the feeling of the
community even if he would; the attempt would be hopeless from
the start, and he was usually dependent on the community for his
livelihood. He did the king's work free of charge, and did it reason-
ably well. But the king paid for the saving to his treasury in terms
of a real if implicit limitation on his power: he could not enforce a
policy opposed to the wishes of the middle class.

The political strength of that class had its base in local govern-
ment and its apex in the House of Commons. The "commons" of

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

they would dispense with it depended on the Crown. A dynasty
that alienated them would bring the House to lif e; a dynasty that
pleased them could, if it chose, reduce the House to a constitutional
ornament.

The political importance of the middle class, in local and central
government, was equaled by its financial importance. ^The people
in these latter ages . . . are no less to be pleased than the peers;
for, as the latter are become less, so ... the commons have all the
weapons in their hands/* 2 The principal weapon was money. The
wealth of the country was rapidly coming into the hands of the most
enterprising among the gentry and burgesses, and the leaven of this
new capitalism was destined to remake English society.

The leaven first appeared in the wool trade, which since the four-
teenth century had been both expanding and changing its charac-
ter. The emphasis was shifting, with the growth of domestic manu-
facture, from the export of raw wool to that of finished cloth. Wool
was a rural as much as an urban industry, and the new capitalism
was not only cracking the craft guilds in the towns, but beginning
to transform the countryside through the agrarian revolution known
as enclosure. The fields of one manor after another were being
turned into sheepfolds; the manorial structure was shattered, and
the tenants were turned out to fend for themselves. Although the
climax was still to come and to be paid for in mass unemployment
the enclosure movement was already increasing the supply of
fluid capital, which was helping in turn to stimulate other phases of
the national economy. The export trade in wool, for example, had
hitherto been largely in the hands of foreigners. Now, with the capi-
tal at hand and the need to expand the selling market, English mer-
chants looked forward to the day when the carrying trade would be
in English bottoms, and the farsighted dreamed of mercantile ex-
pansion on a far greater scale.

These capitalists, of ship and sheep-run, looked to the new dy-
nasty to further their ambitions. They had little interest in the legal-
ity of Henry Tudor's claim to the throne, and none in his being a
romantic king. Romance had hitherto usually meant a profitless war
in France, with its Agincourt or its Poitiers, for which the king had
had the glory and the taxpayer the bill. What the capitalists asked

2 Sir Walter Raleigh, quoted by C. H. Mcflwain: The High Court of Parlia-
ment and Its Supremacy (New Haven and London, 1910), p. 339.

H

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

consolidate and expand the French state. The attempt created a co-
alition of enemies, as aggression has done ever since. The principal
opponents of France were the Hapsburg House of Burgundy-Austria
and the shrewd pair whose marriage had made one kingdom out of
Aragon and Castile. These two dynasties, Austrian and Spanish,
were brought together by their fear of France, and soon another
marriage paved the way for their union. The situation in the making
was one that endured in substance till the reign of Louis XIV: a bal-
ance of power between France and the Austro-Spanish combine.
The state of that balance was a major determinant of English for-
eign policy.

"Balance of power" is a phrase in bad repute today. It cannot be
used intelligibly, even about the Europe of 1500, without clearing
away the nonsense attached to it. The balance was not created by
England or by any other country; it came into existence automati-
cally as Europe emerged from medievalism into the era of nation-
states, and it derived from the nature of international relations in
that era just as a balance scale derives from the nature of the laws of
gravity; one kind of balance is no more good or evil than the other.
"Balance-of -power politics" is not a phrase of reproach, though it is
often used as one. With politics what they are and have been since
the days of Henry VII, it is mere redundancy.

This does not imply that a balance of power in Europe was some-
thing Englishmen could take for granted. Quite the contrary. It was
a condition from which they drew enormous advantages; it was
periodically shifting, and at some moments it ceased to exist. If the
advantages were to be enjoyed, the balance had to be maintained
and, when necessary, restored. Otherwise if a single power over-
shadowed die Continent English commercial and imperial inter-
ests overseas would be jeopardized and the British Isles threatened
with invasion. Hence the consistent opposition of England, and later
of Great Britain, to everyone who has attempted to unify Europe by
dominating it.

Great Britain has fought these attempts, as her critics point out.
But they usually fail to point out that she has fought them success-
fully only because she has had allies: other states have shared her
interest in the balance to the point of fighting for it. This is neither
accident nor the result of British shrewdness. The age of sovereign

13

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

The future of English power depended to a great extent on the skill
of four persons, successive sovereigns of the Tudor House, in pro-
tecting their country against disaster from abroad and tending the
growth of its resources at home. Strong monarchs were needed, and
strong monarchs were forthcoming. The different members of the
family had their failings, but weakness was not in them.

Ill The Two Henrys

THE FOUNDING father of the dynasty is one of its least-known
members. Henry Tudor became Henry VII by the grace of God and
the virtue of his sword-arm. But he was not a soldier-king, and he
sadly lacked flamboyance of other sorts. Posterity has almost forgot-
ten him. His contemporaries did not, at least if they were wise, and
his memory lingered for several generations; his best epitaph was
the phrase of a biographer born in his granddaughter's reign. "What
he minded," said Sir Francis Bacon, "that he compassed."

There could be no better summary of Henry's reign. What he
minded, or purposed, was modest by the standards of an Edward III
or Henry V. The Crown of France was no temptation for this self-
made king; his aims were practical and adapted to the situation. Se-
curity for his House; prosperity for his people, so that the middle
class might identify its interests with the dynasty and leave to it the
affairs of state with little parliamentary surveillance; recognition of
England, and of himself as her parvenu leader, by the powers of
Europe. These were what he minded, and these in great measure he
compassed. He made himself secure at home, superficially by elimi-
nating two pretenders to the throne, basically by showing their sup-
porters among the nobility that the Crown was no longer to be tri-
fled with by gangsters. He promoted English trade in every feasible
way a treaty here, pressure there and opened to his subjects
one commercial road after another; in the long story of British mer-
cantile expansion, Henry's role is of key importance. He won ac-
ceptance abroad partly by his hard-driving skill in trade treaties,
even more by his tortuous foreign policy. The intricacies of the lat-
ter were worthy of the Cinquecento, but its underlying design was
simple.

Henry's purpose abroad was to fill his coffers and enhance his
prestige, and his principal means were foreign wars and marriages.

15

Seeds of Greatness y 1485-1603

Arthur's younger brother Henry, now Prince o Wales. Canon law
forbade a man's marrying his brother's widow. But the Pope was pre-
vailed upon to grant a dispensation, and the court of Madrid was
equally agreeable. Katharine was accordingly provided with a sec-
ond bridegroom, although the arrangements took so long that he
was king before she married him. The wedding, arranged out of
frugality and common sense, affected the whole subsequent history
of the Tudors and their subjects.

Henry VII died in 1509. He was unlamented, because he had nei-
ther minded nor compassed the love of his subjects. But he had
compelled respect from them and from Europe. He left to his son
an established dynasty, an ordered country, and the largest cash re-
serve of any king in Christendom. He also left him the opportunity
to be singularly popular by contrast. Young Henry was equipped
for popularity charming, handsome, a good athlete, and (so the
courtiers said) a scholar and a gentleman. He inherited his father's
uncanny sense of public opinion and his iron will, but he lacked one
major gift: a sense of humor. Underneath his sometimes boisterous
gaiety, Henry VIII regarded himself with great seriousness. He was
an egoist whom power slowly corrupted.

The first decade of the new reign was more romantic than impor-
tant in itself. A war against France in conjunction with Henry's
father-in-law, King Ferdinand, served the interests of Spain rather
than of England, and Ferdinand blithely deserted when it suited
his turn. Simultaneously the traditional invasion from the north
ended in disaster for the Scots on Flodden Field. Hoodwinked by
his father-in-law, attacked by his brother-in-law, Henry had little
reason to trust in marriage alliances.

He was not yet cured of his taste for foreign adventures, and nei-
ther was his confidant and minister, Cardinal Wolsey. The two
seemed intent on involving England against her will in the maze of
Continental politics. Those politics depended in great part, by 1519,
on the relationship of three young men. Henry was the least of the
three in power, if not in ambition; the others were Francis I of
France and Charles of Hapsburg Charles of Austria, of Burgundy,
of Spain. The three men competed for election as Holy Roman Em-
peror, which reveals the depth of nonsense to which Henry's ro-
mantic ambition could lead him. Fortunately for England, Charles

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

time Henry might die as abruptly as his brother had done. Only one
solution was possible. A male heir would have to be born in wed-
lock, since no bastard could have a secure title. The King must
therefore marry again in hopes of a son. Katharine had failed to ful-
fill the basic function of a queen, and Katharine must go.

The idea of getting rid of her was not new. Henry considered her
as an agent of Spain, and his anger at Spanish duplicity had led him
years before to threaten her with separation. But that would not
now serve his purpose, because it would not leave him free to re-
marry. Divorce in the modern sense did not exist in the sixteenth
century. Nothing remained except to have the marriage annulled
to have the Church declare that Henry and Katharine had never
been legally man and wife, and that Princess Mary was illegitimate.
This would be a scandal to rock Europe. It would also be a gamble
on physiological accident: the living child would be disinherited for
a son not yet conceived. But the only alternative was risking every-
thing on Mary, and this was even more of a gamble.

As Henry struggled with his dilemma, his eyes fell on Anne
Boleyn. The more he saw of her, the more convinced he became that
he was living in sin with Katharine. His marriage had been author-
ized by a dispensation from Pope Julius, but did even the Pope have
the power to dispense with the law of God? That law had been de-
clared to Moses in no uncertain terms. "If a man shall take his
brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his broth-
er's nakedness; they shall be childless." Although the last phrase
was difficult to reconcile with the existence of Mary, the death of
Katharine's other children before or soon after birth did suggest di-
vine anger at the union. Henry became convinced that Julius had
exceeded the authority even of God's vicegerent on earth, and that
the error should be rectified at once by his successor. Whether such
reasoning was hypocrisy is a matter of definition. Sincere religious
scruples, in a man without humor, may further the conviction that
he should have his own way.

These were the ingredients of Henry's decision. Although religion
played its part, as did the charms of Anne, the dominant factor was
dynastic. Henry was primarily a great politician; he was only sec-
ondarily devout and sensual. But the Book of Leviticus was there for
the reading, and Anne was to be had for the asking provided she
was asked to be queen. In the spring of 1527 Henry revealed the in-

19

Seeds of Greatness, 14851603

England. The structure of church and state had been drastically re-
vised by statute, and the participation of Parliament had enormously
strengthened its constitutional role.

The reason, as always in the growth of parliament, was eminently
practical. Henry's aims gave focus to unformulated desires of lords
and commons; he found that this Parliament would do his bidding
with little need of threats or cajoleries, and he used it to give his
will the sanction of national approval. Whether the nation approved
can never be known because the nation was inarticulate. But the
aristocracy and middle class approved, and they purported to speak
in Parliament for all Englishmen.

What were Henry's aims, and why did they have such support?
His original objective seems to have been to exert pressure on the
papacy by increasing royal as opposed to papal control of the Eng-
lish church. The move was popular not only in Parliament but also
in sections of the English clergy. Papal control was unpopular in an
age of rising nationalism, and the popes of recent years had been
more concerned with feeding condottieri than with feeding Christ's
flock. The English church, furthermore, was in serious need of re-
form. Wolsey had attempted to reform it by use of his legatine au-
thority, but the attempt had stirred anti-papal feeling in clergy
and laity alike. Reformation could come only through the King in
Parliament.

For three years the assault on papal jurisdiction continued, until
by 1532 Henry had virtually replaced Clement as head of the Eng-
lish church. Still no sign came from Rome of a more amenable atti-
tude on the basic problem. The Pope did make one concession of fu-
ture consequence: he concurred in the appointment of Thomas
Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. But on the issue of the an-
nulment he stood firm because he had to. He was still in the Haps-
burg shadow, and he could not bargain. Henry's policy of intimida-
tion had failed; it left him with an enormous increment of power,
but Katharine was still his wife. The logic of what he had already
done compelled "him to go on.

By this time it was clear that he would not go on unaided. He
had support for a reform so drastic that it would necessarily entail
a complete breach with Rome the abolition of the monasteries.
The regular clergy were at this time in a peculiarly vulnerable posi-
tion. Through the centuries they had acquired vast wealth, until

21

Seeds of Greatness, 14851603

interest made the new peers loyal to the King and distrustful of
the Pope.

Henry succeeded in his objectives, but the one with which he had
started gave him the most trouble. Although Anne bore him a child
with scandalous alacrity, it was only another girl, christened Eliza-
beth. He was less patient than he had been with Katharine; time and
his temper were getting shorter. In 1536 he had Anne beheaded on
a variety of unsavory and unproved charges, and a few days later
married again. This shadow-wife, Jane Seymour, produced the long-
awaited son and then died. Henry went on to three more marriages,
but they were unimportant because they were childless. His prog-
eny now consisted of two girls and a boy, each by a different
mother. In order of age they were Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward,
but in order of succession the last took precedence over his half-
sisters. Henry drew a -will and had it given statutory form; it left the
crown to the lines successively of Edward, of Mary, and of Eliza-
beth, and then, in default of issue of any of these three, to the line
of his own sister Mary. The succession at last seemed reasonably
secure.

IV Catholic and Protestant

HENRY left to his children a legacy of troubles. There were the ru-
ins of the Spanish match and the hostility of Rome. There was the
Franco-Scots menace, complicated by the Stuart claim to the throne.
There was the rising strength of the middle class, because of which
Tudor society could never achieve more than a transient equilib-
rium. Greatest of all, and interwoven with the others, was trouble
in the Church. The difficulties of Henry's children, and of the Stu-
arts who followed them, are intelligible only in terms of the church
that Henry established.

Within that church were powerful opposing forces, and it was
only a question of time before their opposition appeared. The obvi-
ous force in Henry's day was that of tradition, discipline, authority;
the latent force clashing with it was the impulsion of individual Eng-
lishmen to find God for themselves. The clash did not come out dur-
ing Henry's lifetime. But after his death it shattered his religious
settlement, undermined Mary's attempt to return to Rome, and
eventually destroyed even the idea of a national church. Out of the
wreckage came on the one hand the modern establishment, with its

23

Seeds of Greatness, 14851603

salvation, which -were the sacraments of the Church. This statement
is theoretically untrue, because theologians did not contend that
those outside the Church would be universally damned. But it is
historically sound. The man in the medieval street, whether of Lon-
don or Byzantium or Kiev, believed that he would be saved not
through his own efforts alone, but also through having his sins peri-
odically wiped away by the absolution of a priest. God acted
through the priest, rather than directly, because the priesthood had
been divinely instituted for the purpose.

"Who hath not heard it spoken
How deep you were within the books of God?
To us, the speaker in His parliament;
To us the imagin'd voice of God Himself;
The very opener and intelligencer
Between the grace, the sanctities of heaven,
And our dull workings.'" 3

The keys of heaven and hell were with the Church. The Pope
laid particular claim to them for a further reason. Because he was
Bishop of Rome, the argument ran, he was the successor of St. Pe-
ter; he was therefore possessed of Petrine supremacy, the same au-
thority over other bishops that Peter had had over other apostles.
The pope derived from Christ his headship of Christ's church; he
was the rock, as Peter had been. The papal position thus rested on
the general theory of apostolic succession and the particular theory
of Petrine supremacy. The latter carried with it the claim that the pa-
pacy had the sole right to determine true doctrine; it was the divine
purpose that the final arbiter of faith should be the Bishop of Rome,
whom Christ Himself had designated as His vicar, or agent.

The papal claims had never been universally accepted, and the
claim to determine doctrine had been opposed with particular
stubbornness. The Eastern Orthodox Church had broken away in
the eleventh century, largely on this issue, but the schism had not
secured papal victory even in western Europe. Anti-papal writers
had advanced the argument that the faith should be determined by
the universitas fideliuin, the body of the f aithful, and had appealed
from the authority of Rome to that of an ecumenical council repre-
senting both clergy and laity. In the fifteenth century the papacy
had triumphed at last, but the opposition was silenced rather than

3 Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 2, IV, ii, 16-20.

25

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

tionship with God. Whatever help he might derive from his minister
and his church, none of the awful responsibility could be transferred
to them. If they or any other authority, secular or religious, per-
mitted him to do what his conscience told "Mm. was sinful, he faced
the alternatives of revolt or damnation. It was not accident that the
Reformation began an era of civil wars and revolutions.

Henry VIII, as a king, had no patience with revolutionaries, and
as a Catholic he had no patience with Protestants. His breach with
Rome was a denial of papal authority, not of authority; he repudi-
ated the theory of Petrine supremacy, but he retained in full the
theory of apostolic succession. His bishops were heirs of the Twelve,
and by virtue of that inheritance his priesthood administered the
sacraments. He himself was not in theory the spiritual head of the
church; he could not be, since he was not in holy orders, and nomi-
nal headship was vested in the archbishop of Canterbury. Final doc-
trinal authority was vested in the source of all other law, the king
in parliament.

Although these were major changes, they were in the long anti-
papal tradition. The Orthodox Church had accepted a large measure
of state control, and in the west the Holy Roman Emperors had
advanced and occasionally made good a claim to surveillance
of the papacy. The conciliar movement of the previous century had
derived from the premise that authority rested not with Christ's
vicar but with His flock. The same premise might apply to a na-
tional segment of the flock; the English equivalent of the ecumeni-
cal council was Parliament, where the bishops and archbishops in
the House of Lords represented the high clergy, and the secular
peers and commons the laity. The first major statement of doctrine
after the breach from Rome was approved by Parliament in the Six
Articles of 1539; ever since then the final word on the faith of the
established church has been by statute.

Thus at the beginning of its separate existence the Church of
England had in it an element of paradox. It was Catholic, authori-
tarian, and episcopal. Yet its bishops, while they had the aura of
apostolic power, depended on the legislature for their dogma and
on the Crown for their policy. This meant in practice, under Henry,
dependence on the Crown. He would not brook the interference of
Parliament any more than of the prelates, and used both as instru-

27

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

retained Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, little real-
izing how that good servant would refashion his master's work.
Cranmer's subservience was deceptive. He was a convinced Eras-
tian, who felt it his duty to implement the royal will; at the same
time he was a devout Christian, whose belief was developing more
and more toward Protestantism. His public duty took precedence
over his private inclinations as long as Henry lived, partly because
he -was too timid to be a ready martyr, partly because he was loyal
to the man who had raised him from obscurity. Henry therefore un-
derestimated him. The spirit that seemed so pliable was in fact a
spring that could be wound but not broken. It was loosed in 1547
by the King's death.

V The Religious Seesaw

THE SUCCEEDING reigns were bound to be a period of rapid de-
velopments. One man had dominated the scene for almost four dec-
ades. For the first two he had ruled, by and large, according to time-
honored formulae; in the third he had broken with Spain, with the
Pope, and with some of the deepest-rooted traditions of the coun-
try; the fourth he had devoted primarily to solidifying his revolu-
tion and preventing its further progress. But revolutions are more
easily begun than halted; they gain an impetus that their initiators
can, at most, delay or divert. Henry's had threatened to get out of
hand even during his lifetime, and at his death plunged England
into a -welter of dissension.

He was succeeded by his son, the one nonentity in the Tudor
House. Edward VI, for whose birth his father had overturned so
much, was a nine-year-old at the time of his accession. His health
was precarious and rapidly grew worse, and at the age of fifteen he
died. During his reign he was almost as shadowy a king as his
mother had been a queen. The power of the Crown devolved upon
two successive Regents, and Edward did not seriously disobey ei-
ther of them except once, by dying.

The history of the reign is important only as it bears on the
Church. For the rest it is an unedifying story of intrigue and judi-
cial murder. The kingdom was governed at first by Edward's mater-
nal uncle, the Duke of Somerset, an idealist before his time. His en-
lightened social policy ended in disaster, and he was ousted and

29

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

suit himself. But toleration was almost as unpopular as social re-
form, and Somerset gave place to Northumberland. The latter
feared that a return to Henrician Catholicism -would mean surren-
dering power to Henry's conservative nobility; he accordingly em-
barked on a new course, less tolerant and more Protestant than his
predecessor's. The result was the prayer book of 1552.

Northumberland and Cranmer were moving too fast for the peo-
ple. Protestant extremists were committing excesses, and iconoclasm
did not add to the popularity of the new ideas but toughened the
roots of the old; Catholicism was deeply planted in nobility and
peasantry alike. The changes were borne because they were made
in the name of the King, and the Church was still the King's busi-
ness. But when Edward lay dying and Northumberland tried to al-
ter the succession, ostensibly to save Protestantism and actually to
save his own skin, he and his schemes were tossed aside. The crown
went as Henry had willed it, to his daughter Mary.

Her accession meant a return to Rome. As the daughter of Katha-
rine of Aragon, Mary had suffered for the faith; she had been de-
clared illegitimate, had been forced into obscurity, and at last had
succeeded to the crown in defiance of Protestant machinations. She
was resolved to bring England back into the papal fold, and she had
a Tudor confidence in her power to do so for her lifetime. But what
would happen when she died? Her legal successor was Elizabeth,
under whom England would in all likelihood drift again into heresy.
This could be avoided only if Mary barred her half-sister by pro-
ducing an heir herself. She was faced with the necessity of marry-
ing, as her father had foreseen, and she had to marry quickly. She
had no doubt about where to turn for a husband; her Spanish blood
and loyalties made the choice obvious. Henry VHfs marriage alli-
ance with Spain, in abeyance for almost thirty years, was promptly
revived by his daughter.

Those thirty years had been a period of relative isolation from
the affairs of Europe. But by 1553 England could no longer remain
aloof. The Queen's marriage was merely the occasion for involve-
ment; the underlying causes were the rise of Spain and the resur-
gence of Roman Catholicism. Charles V, the old and tired Emperor,
was on the verge of abdicating and completing the partition of his
vast inheritance into two parts the imperial title and the Austrian
dominions to the line of his brother, and to his son the Low Coun-

31

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

nate all shades of opposition by striking at the extremists. She dis-
regarded her Spanish advisers, who knew when persecution was im-
politic, and in 1555 she began the series of trials and burnings for
heresy that have given her the name of bloody. The martyrs came
from all walks of life, but Mary, like her father, preferred to strike
at the prominent for the sake of the object lesson. The greatest of
her victims was Thomas Cranmer Cranmer the vacillating, caught
in his old struggle between loyalty and conscience, recanting and re-
tracting and recanting again, then going at last to the fire with stead-
fast courage. The nation looked on appalled. Such things might hap-
pen abroad; at home wholesale burnings were unheard of. They
turned the stomachs even of sixteenth-century Englishmen, scarcely
a squeamish lot, and incited riots that verged on rebellions. Mary's
policy was discrediting not Protestantism, but the principle of per-
secution and the Queen who implemented it.

Mary's foreign policy further sapped her prestige. She sent Eng-
lish troops to aid her husband against France, and as a result lost
Calais; England was subordinated to Spain and paid in humiliation.
Mary's achievement was to associate, in the minds of her people, the
Spanish alliance and the return to Rome with persecution at home
and failure abroad. Out of this association grew the nationalism of
the coming age a spirit neither Catholic nor Protestant, but anti-
Spanish and anti-papal. When the Queen died in 1558, without the
child she had so desperately hoped for, her subjects were ready to
be quit of everything for which she had stood.

The new sovereign, a red-headed girl of twenty-five, was an un-
known quantity. As Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth could scarcely
be partial to Spain and the Pope. She had proved her dexterity by
staying alive: during Mary's reign she had been the hope of the op-
position as heiress presumptive, and a false step might have led her
to the block. But dexterity was not enough to meet the enormous
problems confronting her. The prestige of the Crown was at lower
ebb than at any other time in the century. Government was impov-
erished; unemployment, pauperism, and social unrest were increas-
ing; the people were divided and confused on the issue of the
church, England was in a poor state to defend herself, and she
would be without a friend in Europe if she broke with Spain.

Elizabeth was undismayed by the prospect. She had self-confi-
dence and a deep, abiding love for her job; she knew even better

33

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

The presumption is so great as I may not suffer it ... nor tolerate
newf angledness ."

The structure of the Church was substantially what it had been
in Henry's day. The novelty was in doctrine, as determined by the
Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571. These articles were so ambiguous that
they have provoked theological controversy ever since, and ambigu-
ity was their political virtue. Elizabeth, even more than Somerset
before her, grasped the fact that the only way to keep the majority
content within a national church was to enforce an ambiguous
dogma. The articles provided it. They were strongly anti-Roman,
but on key points of controversy between Catholic and Protestant,
such as the nature of communion, they were so skillfully phrased
that they gave great latitude to individual interpretation. The
prayer book of 1552,. with its unequivocally Protestant passages
modified, provided the guide for uniform worship, and the Queen
provided the enforcement. Pastors who led their flocks from the
designated path of salvation were sternly recalled to it. The path
was broad enough for Catholics and Protestants to walk it together.
But its boundaries were fixed, and guarded by the powers of church
and state.

The boundaries excluded both extremes. The Roman Catholic
the recusant, as he was then called might be tolerated in practice
if he kept his religion to himself, but he could not assert Petrine su-
premacy without running the risk of a traitor s death. The thorough-
going Protestant might believe virtually what he pleased, but he had
to accept the authority of his bishop; behind it stood the coercive
force of the Crown. Both extremists were dissatisfied, and hence
were potential dangers. Yet for the moment neither could gain
adherents. The mass of Englishmen still associated Rome with the
dark days of Mary and radical Protestantism with the discord of Ed-
ward's reign. They turned to the new compromise with relief if not
with enthusiasm.

The first danger to materialize was from tie recusants. But it was
the result of foreign developments more than of domestic, and can
best be considered later as part of the great struggle against Spain.
The danger from left-wing Protestants was an internal matter. It
gave the Queen more and more trouble as the reign wore on, and by
the time of her death was preparing an explosion.

The short-lived Protestantism of Edward's reign had been largely

35

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

Religious authority did not rest in a monarch or in bishops, but in
the body of the elect. That body might depute its authority to a rep-
resentative council or synod; the synod might then govern the
church, even with a rod of iron, but only by virtue of a power dele-
gated by the governed. This element of democracy found its first
expression in Calvinist churches of the late sixteenth century,
among the French Huguenots, for example, and in the Scottish Kirk.
The influence of the Scottish experiment in particular was soon felt
in England, where the Puritan touched a match to the kindling of
ideas.

No one in Elizabethan England could have foreseen the resultant
conflagration. But Puritan hostility to the church settlement was
soon apparent; as Calvinism spread, from tie returning Marian ex-
iles and other sources, the hostility grew stronger and more vocal.
It was not directed so much against dogma, because the Thirty-
Nine Articles might be read in a Calvinist sense, as it was against
the bishops, the crux of church organization. A bishop, in his dual
capacity as successor of an apostle and agent of the Crown, repre-
sented the principle of human authority devolving from the top
downward. The Puritan represented the principle of authority de-
volving from the body of the elect upward. The two principles were
irreconcilable, and even Elizabeth could not frame an ecclesiastical
organization to comprehend them both.

She made no attempt to do so. For years the Puritans seemed to
be lonely voices, crying aimlessly, but in the 1580's they emerged as
an effective and well-knit group. Although their numbers were still
small, their influence was disproportionately large. They came in
great part from the urban middle class, the group that was growing
most rapidly in wealth, political maturity, and ambition. The House
of Commons was aghast when one of its members, the Puritan Peter
Wentworth, lectured the Queen on her shortcomings, and the House
committed him to the Tower for his pains. But a number of his fel-
low-members were beginning to wonder in their hearts whether he
might not be right in his major premise, that the royal prerogative
was more ubiquitous than need be. Might not the Church be more
godly if the House were allowed a hand in amending it? As for the
self-important agents of prerogative, the bishops, might not a cur-
tailment of their power improve their Christian humility? The times

37

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

ish blow finally came, the English had had ample time to make
ready and had used it well.

In the first year of Elizabeth's reign she was a godsend to Philip.
The Dauphin of France was married to Mary Stuart, who was her-
self at once queen of Scots, daughter of the great French House of
Guise, and claimant to the throne of England. The marriage paved
the way for a dynastic union of France and Scotland, to which
England might be added if Elizabeth died or a French invasion de-
throned her. Such a state would jeopardize Philip's empire, and he
was solicitous for Elizabeth's health.

The tightening of the Stuart-Valois tie was no more to Eliza-
beth's taste than to Philip's; it placed her between the Spanish fry-
ing pan and the Franco-Scottish fire. But soon the Scots themselves
took a hand. Their nationalism, aroused by French predominance in
the government, had been given a religious impetus by the rapid
spread of Calvinism. The chief object of their discontent was the
Regent, Mary Stuart's mother, who was a Frenchwoman and a Cath-
olic. A rebellion broke out against her, and the rebels asked aid from
England. Elizabeth had no love for rebels or Calvinists, but her
scruples rarely took precedence over her interests. She sent help,
and the Scots government agreed to send home its French troops.
This agreement, the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1560, marked the be-
ginning of the end of French influence in Scotland.

In a decade the Scots broke the tie that English policy and force
had failed to break in three centuries. Their reasons were religious
and political: their shift from Catholicism to their own brand of
Calvinism had weakened the pull of France, and the grandiose am-
bition of the House of Guise had made it seem a greater menace to
their independence than the House of Tudor. A more basic reason
was strategic: France was useful to them only as long as she could
assist them in time of need, either by direct intervention or by ab-
sorbing English energies in Europe; by 1560 England's sea power in
home waters was a barrier to direct intervention, and the English
had long since abandoned their tradition of large-scale military ad-
ventures on the Continent. The Franco-Scots accord was dissolved,
in other words, because the factors that had occasioned it ceased to
operate. Scotland was thereby condemned to an isolation from
which she could escape only by drawing closer to England.

The Treaty of Edinburgh was merely the first stage in Elizabeth's

39

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

erlands, but the Dutch continued to defy him. He was playing a
chess game with a continent for board, simultaneously attacking
and defending, and Mary Stuart was only one of his many pieces.

England was greatly concerned in the revolt of the Netherlands.
She had long had with them a close economic connection, that be-
tween the sheep and the loom, and she quickly felt anything that
affected their industrial health. The Dutch, furthermore, were Cal-
vinists, fighting against the common enemy of all Protestants. For
economic and religious reasons their struggle concerned the English
middle class. Elizabeth shared the concern, but her position was del-
icate. She still had no love for rebels, however useful; besides, what
if she embroiled herself with Philip for their sake, and they then
made peace? Yet she wished to prevent their defeat, because they
occupied Spanish armies that might otherwise be turned against
England. Prudence dictated official neutrality, combined with a cov-
ert harrying of Philip's resources in any way that came to hand.

The Elizabethans evolved a popular and profitable technique for
waging this undeclared war. English trade had been increasing rap-
idly during the preceding decades, and the traders had been push-
ing farther and farther afield. Their ships were warships, for the
navy had not yet been differentiated from the merchant marine;
these privately owned vessels began to prey on Spanish commerce
from the New World. Elizabeth denied responsibility for her sub-
jects" piracy, while she put some money in secret into their specula-
tive ventures. Success meant profit and a weakening of Spanish
resources; failure merely meant death or prison for the ships* com-
panies and a washing of official hands. In such an informal war the
sea dogs were a most convenient weapon.

The loot was gratifying, but the important result was the effect
on the looters. Large numbers of Englishmen acquired a knowledge
of the high seas, of how to sail them anywhere and in all weather,
and learned to fight as resourcefully as they sailed; soon they knew
every weakness of the galleons they hunted. They "went out for
plunder, but they brought back with it the beginnings of a naval tra-
dition unsurpassed in history.

The Spaniards were vulnerable to attack. Their sea power had
grown in areas of relatively calm water and reliable winds: first the
Mediterranean, then the southern Atlantic, finally the western edge
of the Pacific. Their ships, designed to sail with the trades and to

41

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

the odds were heavily in their favor. The legendary picture of Sir
Francis Drake finishing his game of bowls after the enemy had been
sighted symbolizes the self-assurance of the expert. Drake, like all
the other competent sea dogs, knew that the tactical advantages of
the English ships would be even greater in home waters than they
had been in the South Atlantic. The Armada was composed of fair-
weather sailers and fair-weather fighters, and the English Channel
is not noted for fair weather.

The Spaniards were also at a mental disadvantage. Naval doc-
trine was not yet born; a fleet engagement was a mere mele. But
the English prepared for battle as sailors, whereas soldiers domi-
nated Spanish planning. The Armada was commanded by a general
with little experience of the sea. His primary objective was not to
destroy the English fleet but to brush it aside, in order to reach
Parma's force and carry it to Kent. The ships were more ferries than
units of fire-power; in action the Spaniards hoped to grapple and
board and win at sword's point. They were planning, in other words,
for a land battle fought on the water.

On July 19, 1588, the Armada was sighted off the Lizard. The
English swarmed out to engage it, and for a week the fight raged up
the Channel. The Spaniards found themselves battered by an enemy
they could not reach; trying to board a faster and well-armed ship,
manned by sailors and gunners who knew their business, was like
trying to wrestle with a striking rattlesnake. When the Spaniards
took refuge in the neutral port of Calais, the English loosed upon
them fireships, the terrifying predecessor of the torpedo, and they
fled again in confusion. By the time they cleared the Channel their
rendezvous with Parma was forgotten; their objective had changed
from invasion to getting home alive. For the majority this proved
impossible. The fleet rounded Scotland rather than brave the Chan-
nel once more, and storms completed the work of English guns.
The wreckage of Spanish power was strewn along the Scottish and
Irish coasts; less than half of the Armada ever saw Spain again. The
great crusade had ended in disaster, and the Spaniards* faith in their
destiny had had a blow from which they never recovered. God, they
said, had forsaken them.

Philip refused to agree. For the next ten years, until his death in
1598, he carried on the war with every means at hand. Although he
dreamed of new armadas, they did not materialize. He therefore

43

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

more nearly conquered than ever before, how was the conquest to
be utilized as a step toward union, like the thirteenth-century
conquest of Wales, or as a chance to exploit the conquered?

VII "Confident from Foreign Purposes"

THE IRISH problem, grim as it was, amounted to only a small cloud
in the Elizabethan sunset. The dominant consideration was Spain,
not Ireland, and in the last years of Elizabeth the dominant fact was
victory over Spain. The fact was apprehended only gradually, yet
its impact was enormous. As defeat brought the Spaniards a sense
that God had deserted them, victory brought the English a complex
elation. Part of it was religious, the feeling that the Lord of Hosts
had set upon the nation the seal of His approval. Part was secular
pride, focused in loyalty to the Crown. Part was a dawning aware-
ness that England's ships enabled her to defy the world. These were
the ingredients of the Elizabethans* legacy to their descendants.

The established church was finally separated from Rome. Philip,
the two Marys, the Armada had done their work beyond undoing,
and the Almighty seemed to have sanctioned the breach. Hatred of
the Pope had become an even more basic tenet of patriotism than
hatred of Spain. In the next century France rose to be the great
political enemy, but enmity to Rome remained inveterate; the suspi-
cion that the sovereign had papal leanings contributed to one revo-
lution, and the certainty precipitated another. A minority of rec-
usants continued to worship in private, but even they slowly lost
hope of returning England to the fold. Elizabeth's Church had be-
come the church of the nation, and the struggle to defend it had en-
gendered a love for it.

What had been defended, and what was loved? The answer was
no clearer than it had been, but the question was in abeyance as
long as national survival was in doubt. The crisis, or at least the
sense of crisis, persisted until the end of the century. This fact,
more than the efforts of government, circumscribed Puritan criti-
cism of the Church. Fundamental problems were tacitly postponed
for the duration, which meant until the last few years of the reign.
By 1600 the crisis was over; Philip was dead, the France of Henry
of Navarre was recovering with phenomenal speed from the ravages
of civil war, the Dutch had made good their independence. The

45

Seeds of Greatness, 1485-1603

Many other Englishmen, at the turn of the century, were antici-
pating a new era. England was not yet a power of the first rank,
but for the first time since the Hundred Years' War she had inter-
vened decisively in European affairs. She had done so, moreover, on
the sea; it had long been the Elizabethans' habitat, and the hum-
bling of Spain brought home to them its importance. The realization
was exhilarating, although only a few had a clear idea of its impli-
cations.

Among the few was Sir Walter Raleigh. He glimpsed, before his
time, one of the elements that later determined the growth of Eng-
lish sea power colonial expansion. He emphasized colonies pri-
marily as weapons against Spain, means of impairing the trade and
security of Philip's empire. According to the best-known publicist of
his circle, Richard Halduyt, English settlements within reach of the
Caribbean would be "a great bridle to the Indies of the king of
Spain." "If you touch him in the Indies, you touch the apple of his
eye; for take away his treasure, which is nervus belli, ... his old
bands of soldiers will soon be dissolved, his purposes defeated, his
power and strength diminished, his pride abated, and his tyranny
utterly suppressed. 9 * 6

This concept found little favor. At court the view prevailed that a
degree of Spanish power was a necessary counterweight to France.
The mercantile interests considered a company chartered to colo-
nize as a slow and risky investment; colonists sucked up money like
a sponge, and the return was likely to be in f ooYs gold. Businessmen
were possessed by the immediate excitement of cash returns from
plunder and trade, and they were as deaf as the Queen's govern-
ment to the plea for a long, weary struggle with the wilderness.

The Elizabethans* excitement over gold was not a mere outburst
of avarice. Gold was pouring in upon them because a fundamental
change had taken place in the geography of trade. In the late fif-
teenth century England had been on the fringe of European com-
merce; in the late sixteenth she was at the heart of it. As a result of
the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries the great trade routes had
shifted from the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East to the

6 "A Particular Discourse concerning the Great Necessity and Manifold
Commodities that are Like to Grow to This Realm of England by the Western
Discoveries lately Attempted," 1584: William H. Dunham and Stanley Pargel-
lis (eds.)> Complaint and Reform in England, 1436-1714 (New York: Oxford
University Press; 1938), pp. 313, 321.

47

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

that of James Stuart was peculiarly so. He was a foreigner, come to
rule a people seething with nationalism. He believed in peace, and
England for a generation had thrived on war with Spain. For all his
intelligence he was a poor judge of men, both in the mass and as in-
dividuals competing for his favor. He was a theorist where Eliza-
beth had been an artist in sovereignty, and the work of art that she
left him was not a fit subject for his rationalism. Last, and worst of
all, his particular theories were sure to upset the delicate Tudor
equilibrium.

James had been nurtured in Scotland on a three-cornered strug-
gle between the Crown, the nobility, and the Church. The nobility
represented a dying order of feudalism that had little effect on the
King's theories of his office, but the Church represented a dynamic
principle: that authority in doctrine and government derives from
all the faithful. Calvinism in Scotland had taken a Presbyterian
form, expressed in a hierarchy of bodies chosen by laymen and
clergy and culminating in the general assembly of the Kirk. The
bishops, although they had not been permanently eradicated, were
largely submerged in this wave of popularism. The real leaders were
the elders and presbyters, whose duty was to bring home the word
of God to every Scot, especially to "God's silly vassal" on the throne.
This was theocracy. The end of it, as James was well aware, would
be the transference of sovereignty from the Crown to the Kirk.
"Some small, fiery-spirited men in the ministry," he complained,
"got such a guiding of the people . . . that, finding the gust of
government sweet, they began to fancy a democratic form."

James himself had a glutton's fondness for "the gust of govern-
ment.'* He had no intention of remaining in tutelage to the clergy or
of abandoning sovereignty to them. As a Christian he was a Calvin-
ist; as a king he was the inveterate enemy of Presbyterians. His
years of controversy with the clergy raised more and more sweeping
claims to authority on both sides. As the Kirk advanced its preten-
sions in the name of God, so did the King. Against the divine right
of the presbytery he asserted the divine right of monarchy a right
inherent in him by heredity, derived not from men but from God,
and not to be curtailed by subject or sovereign. His prerogative was
for him the earthly will of the Almighty, to which all human author-
ity was subordinate. The proud claims of God's elect were matched
by the equally proud claims of God's anointed.

5*

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

meddle with doctrine; the laity, in return, he expected not to med-
dle with administration. The reality of Stuart power might then
rise to the height o Stuart theory.

II The Pedantic King

JAMES'S hopes were illusory. Disillusionment came first in the
Church, where he had expected the most, and it naturally came
from those who had expected the most from him. The English Puri-
tans petitioned him for a number of minor changes in church ritual
and government, and he agreed to a conference with them at Hamp-
ton Court. Among their requests was a suggestion that the bishop
of each diocese should be advised by a synod of the lower clergy.
This point, moderate as it seemed, stung the King to fury. He ac-
cused the petitioners of desiring a Presbyterian system, which to
his mind filled with memories of his mother's dethronement and
his own humiliations meant that they were rebels. He virtually
told them so, and ended his tirade with a final blast: **no bishop, no
king."

Those four words brought into the open an issue that had long
been latent. James was not a diplomat; his volcanic temper boiled
over, unlike Elizabeth's, at the most inopportune moments. But even
in a rage he made sense. Thanks to his Scottish experience he saw
the heart of the issue more clearly than the Puritans did themselves.
His control of the Church through the bishops was rooted in the
Tudor tradition; consequently the Puritans were challenging the ac-
cepted nature of prerogative. James took up the challenge at once,
and stated it with a logic his opponents did not yet dare to accept.
Whether he was wise to be logical is beside the point. His action
identified the Crown with the episcopacy; the two stood together
through the storms of the next forty years, and they fell together.

The Puritans at Hampton Court were appalled by the royal blast.
Their expectations, cherished for years, had been shattered in a mat-
ter of minutes: they were no better off under the new King than un-
der the old Queen. Three hundred of them were expelled from holy
orders because they would not conform, and a few left the country;
but the great majority reconciled themselves once more to biding
their time. Their party was not yet bold or numerous enough to
join battle on the lines the King had drawn. His position behind the

53

The Passing of Tudor England) 1603-1660

The King had the choice between two alternatives to bankruptcy:
either to ask for more and more grants or to find other sources of
income.

The first alternative was out of the question. The underlying
causes of the problem were not clearly perceived either at court or
in Parliament, and misunderstanding bred resentment; courtiers
muttered about a niggardly legislature, the legislators about an ex-
travagant court. The commons were averse to voting money at the
best of times, and their reluctance grew in proportion to their griev-
ances. James could not look to them for any major increase in sup-
ply unless he was willing to abandon, in return, those aspects of the
prerogative to which they objected. This he could not do; his pre-
rogative was part of him. He was therefore forced to the second al-
ternative, the search for other sources of revenue.

First he tried to fill his coffers by collecting import duties. The
courts upheld him, but the commons grew restive. Next he offered
to surrender a multitude of archaic feudal obligations owed to the
Crown, in return for a permanent parliamentary grant of ,200,000
a year. This reasonable proposal, known as the Great Contract^
foundered on an extraneous issue: Parliament began to criticize the
bishops, and James sacrificed the chance of stabilizing his income to
the protection of his Church. Early in 1611 he dissolved the Houses.
For the next decade, with one brief exception, he ruled by preroga-
tive alone.

The breach with Parliament necessitated increasing the ordinary
revenue by hook or crook. The King's expedients strained the lim-
its of legality, and thereby brought to the fore another issue implicit
since the reign began the role of the law courts in the state.
Would the judges adopt the King's view that he was the interpreter
of the law, and acquiesce in any innovation, financial or otherwise,
for which his legal staff could spin an argument? Or would they
stand out in the absence of Parliament as the guardians of the sub-
ject against the Crown? On the answer hinged much more than the
continuance of James's personal rule.

Magna Carta had established the principle that the will of the
king was subordinate to the fundamental law of the land. The prin-
ciple had subsequently been dramatized by the deposition of two
monarchs one on the charge, among others, that he had claimed
to have the law in his own breast. But if it was not there, where was

55

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

King's expedients, whether archaisms or innovations, failed to fill
his coffers; and his need for cash soon led him into a disastrous ex-
periment with the wool trade. The bulk of English cloth was ex-
ported for finishing abroad, so that domestic manufacturers were
losing, it seemed, a profit in which the Crown might share. In 1615,
accordingly, the export of unfinished cloth was stopped, and a sin-
gle private company was entrusted with finishing and dyeing it at
home. The results were that foreign merchants refused to buy, the
finished cloth piled up in London, and unemployment spread
through the clothing districts. Within two years the experiment col-
lapsed, but by then the harm had been done. In 1618 the economy
of Europe began to be disrupted by the Thirty Years' War, and
England's Continental market could not be restored; the wool trade
remained in the doldrums for years. Lasting depression, in any era
of planned economy, injures the prestige of the government by dis-
crediting its planners.

Most men weathered the hard times with no more than grum-
bling, as most Puritans bore their religious grievances. But pov-
erty and failure drove some, as conscience drove others, to seek a
new life overseas. Few went to the Continent; economic conditions
there were as uninviting as at home, and the average Englishman or
Scot of the period was too parochial to adjust to a foreign society.
The emigrants turned instead to the two areas that the Elizabethans
had dreamed of colonizing, Ireland and the coast of North America.
The government permitted them to go; they were often troublesome
elements in the population, and no one could foresee that they car-
ried with them seeds of greater trouble.

The exodus to Ireland was made possible by the rebellion of 1598.
The lands of rebel chieftains, particularly in the northern province
of Ulster, "were considered forfeit to the Crown and were largely al-
located to settlers from Britain; the Irish were reduced to tenants,
who thirsted for revenge on their new landlords. Now that England
and Scotland were joined in a dynastic union, Scots were quick to
take advantage of the opportunity opened to them in the planta-
tion of Ulster, where they soon became the predominant group.
This Calvinist invasion in the north alarmed the Anglo-Irish gentry
of the Pale, and their old loyalty to the Crown began to give place
to a sense of solidarity with the rest of Catholic Ireland. Thus the
policy of plantation split the island in two. Southern Ireland was

57

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

peake and the New England coast. That war gave Britain a breath-
ing spell, between the waning of the Spanish menace and the rising
of the French, during which she laid the foundations of empire and,
at the end, of a navy in the modern sense.

The Jacobeans, like their contemporaries on the Continent, were
far more concerned with the Thirty Years* War than with events in
America. But their concern was relatively superficial, unlike that in
France or Sweden, because the war did not touch the core of their
interests. They could therefore afford the luxury of a quarrel. Al-
though King James and his subjects agreed on the need for inter-
vention, they disagreed on the method. The upshot was a long and
angry debate, which produced negligible results in Europe but had
major results at home.

James's daughter had married Frederick, Elector Palatine, a lead-
ing German Calvinist, and in the first storm of the Thirty Years*
War Spanish troops drove the Elector and his wife into exile. The
honor of the Stuart House and the cause of Protestantism were alike
involved in restoring Frederick to the Palatinate, and James and his
subjects for once had a common objective. But their disagreement
on how to attain it appeared soon after Parliament met in 1621.

The real issue lay between two concepts of foreign policy. The
commons, as so often in their struggle with the Stuarts, looked to
the past for guidance: in order to coerce Spain they advocated a
naval war in the Elizabethan manner. James differed, and with rea-
son. The object was no longer Elizabethan, to defend the British
Isles or relieve pressure on the Dutch, but to secure Spanish with-
drawal from the Palatinate from an inland region out of reach of
a navy. How to do it? The method of later generations was to use
Britain's sea power in conjunction with the land power of a Euro-
pean ally. Although James did not grasp this possibility, he saw that
naval war alone was wide of the mark. It might enrich the English
merchants, but it would leave Frederick and his wife to a lifetime of
exile. The King believed that he had a better solution. If the wind
could not blow the cloak off the Spaniard, the sun might warm
it off.

He revived an old project for a marriage alliance between the In-
fanta and the Prince of Wales, now conditioned on Spanish evacua-
tion of the Palatinate and with war as an alternative. British friend-
ship was valuable to Spain: France was sure to oppose, sooner or

59

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

the Huguenots. The only possible hope was from Parliament, and a
new one assembled in March 1628.

The shame and anger of the past years found immediate voice. In
May the Petition of Right was submitted to the King, with the prom-
ise of handsome subsidies if he signed it. It declared illegal four
main instruments of his prerogative: martial law in time of peace,
billeting, arbitrary taxation, and arbitrary imprisonment. He hesi-
tated, and considered dissolving Parliament. But his word was
pledged to the Rochellais, and he could not help them without cash.
He surrendered, and the petition became law.

Like other landmarks in British constitutional history, the Peti-
tion of Right was a specific remedy for the grievances of a particu-
lar moment. It "was an answer to the domestic crisis precipitated by
the attempt to aid the Huguenots; its effect was not on those unfor-
tunate rebels but on the structure of royal government. The ban on
arbitrary taxation and imprisonment was subsequently evaded
(Charles was as ingenious in thwarting the purpose of a law as he
was scrupulous in observing its letter), but the military clauses of
the great petition he could not evade. Those clauses, combined with
his poverty, made it impossible to hold together an army worth the
name. His government henceforth had to rest solely on consent, and
that base was already beginning to crack.

Parliament turned at once to attack Buckingham, in words which
revealed its anger and humiliation. Charles was asked ^whether the
miserable disasters and ill success that hath accompanied all your
late designs and actions . . . have not extremely wasted that stock
of honor that was left unto this kingdom, sometimes terrible to all
other nations and now declining to contempt beneath the meanest/*
The Duke was named as the cause of failure, and his dismissal was
requested. Charles curtly refused. Soon afterward Buckingham was
assassinated. It was a cruel blow to the Xing; the one friend of his
life was gone, and his people went wild with rejoicing. The Lon-
doners welcomed the dead Duke even more enthusiastically than
they had the live one five years before on his return from Spain; the
trained bands escorting the funeral procession beat their drums for

joy-
Buckingham was the last outstanding exemplar of the Jacobean

era. His world went with him, drummed joyfully through the Lon-
don streets; there was no longer a place for the political frivolity of

63

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

duced a vicious circle of disaster abroad and discord at home, which
had indeed reduced Britain "to contempt beneath the meanest/'

While the wars against France and Spain continued only in name,
the war at Westminster grew fiercer. The major questions in dis-
pute were no longer military, but financial and religious. The King
was continuing to collect import duties; his legal grounds may have
been sound, but to the House of Commons he seemed to be violat-
ing the Petition of Right by arbitrary taxation. The issue was par-
ticularly serious for another reason: most members of the House felt
that the Church was being subverted that the king who had aban-
doned the Protestant cause in Europe was now betraying it at home,
and that only Parliament remained as defender of the faith. Defense
would be impossible if the Crown obtained an independent reve-
nue. Hence the struggle over import duties -was only the surface of
a struggle over religion.

What alarmed the commons was the fact that Charles was pro-
moting to control of the Church a group of clergy with Catholic be-
liefs. These men preached, in effect, a return to Henrician Catholi-
cism. They emphasized the apostolic power of the bishops, the
distinction between priesthood and laity, the vital importance of the
sacraments; to the Puritan claim that the Bible contained the full
word of God they opposed the authority of a church derived from
Christ. They also taught that obedience to the Crown was a reli-
gious duty, and that whoever resisted or even questioned the King's
actions risked damnation. They had no practical alternative to this
Erastian position. Ever since Henry VIII had substituted King for
Pope, the ecclesiastical prerogative had been inseparable from the
secular. Church and state were two aspects of a single community,
and the Stuart emphasis on authoritarian monarchy inevitably re-
vived the tradition of an authoritarian church under the royal aegis.
To good Protestants this tradition, long dormant, seemed a shocking
innovation that smelled of popery. If the King accepted it, he would
extend the struggle with his subjects from the halls of Westminster
into every parish church.

James had been saved from the attempt by his Calvinism and acu-
men. Because he had kept Elizabeth's broad doctrinal settlement
the Puritans had not obtained widespread support for their attack
on Church government; the majority had remained content. In his
declining years, however, new men came forward to upset his work.

65

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

not force him to adopt their policy. He had the initiative, both in
law and in practice; once he had embarked on a course of which
they disapproved, the most they could do was to bring his govern-
ment to a standstill. This they had virtually achieved by the spring
of 1629.

From Charles's viewpoint the achievement was the work of wilful
trouble-makers, who had turned his best intentions into grievances.
The commons had cried for war with Spain in 1624; he had gone to
war. They had cursed the French marriage and called for help to
the Huguenots; he had sent help at the cost of the Bourbon alliance.
They had refused the money needed to make the army effective,
and then had blamed the Duke for failure. They had utilized the cri-
sis caused by their parsimony to limit the secular prerogative in the
Petition of Right, and had gone on to assail the ecclesiastical pre-
rogative. What was the end to be, the King might have asked with
some reason, except anarchy in Church and state? The commons
were, in fact, trying to deprive him of powers essential to govern-
ment control of the armed forces, of foreign policy, of the Church-
Yet they were not assuming those powers themselves because they
had no means of doing so.

Charles saw only one solution. The Crown in Parliament had be-
come the negation of government, but government had to go on;
hence it had to be government by the King alone. He would rule
for the rest of his life if God were good without summoning an-
other parliament. Sovereigns before him had tried this experiment
for long periods, but since the days of Henry VIII none had at-
tempted to erect it into a permanent system. Charles made the at-
tempt; the old regime had collapsed, and the King substituted a new
regime of prerogative. It lasted for eleven years, which were the
seed time of revolution. Then it collapsed in turn, and gave place to
a more obviously revolutionary phase, dominated at the end by the
men who gave their name to the whole movement. But the Puritan
Revolution was far more than a rising of the Puritans. The forces
that made it had been at work before 1629, and they were still at
work long after the monarchy was restored in 1660. What Charles
achieved by his personal rule was to bring the forces temporarily
together, in overwhelming opposition to the principles for which he
stood.

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

co-operate with the Crown in emergencies, but in tranquil times it
had the will and means to assert its autonomy. In this sense it was
analogous with the House of Commons; it could paralyze govern-
ment more slowly, less dramatically, but with greater finality.
Charles's only way to avert paralysis centralization was also the
surest way to outrage the self-importance of the local magistrates.
For eleven years he tried to control the country through the pre-
rogative courts, through royal proclamations, through letters, com-
mands, and messengers from the privy council. His paternalistic
program had three salient parts: economic interference, a new
scheme of taxation, and Laudianisxn in the Church. One or more of
these parts antagonized almost every Englishman of importance,
and so bred resistance to the Crown in its own agents. By 1640 the
wheels of government had almost ceased to turn.

The King's economic interference was benevolently meant and in
the long mercantilist tradition. But it was carried into new fields,
and beyond the traditional limits in old ones; the government
stepped on a multitude of toes. Native-grown tobacco, for example,
-was competing with Virginian; the Crown's attempt to suppress the
domestic industry conflicted with the interests of rural producers
and consumers, and therefore of rural magistrates, and the Crown
failed. An effort to improve the wool trade by regulating the minu-
tiae of the manufacturing process aroused protest and passive resist-
ance, and came to nothing. Endeavors to curtail enclosure, to limit
unemployment, to regulate wages, were equally unavailing. The
King's planners were frustrated and his subjects annoyed. Even a
seventeenth-century businessman disliked having his business run
for him. He rarely expressed himself; the weight of custom was on
the side of a planned economy. But his f eeling was one of the many
centrifugal forces in English localism.

If Charles's economic policies were the climax of an old paternal-
ism, his scheme of taxation was new. His lawyers were ingenious in
hiding his fiscal experiments under a cloak of precedent, but they
could not long hide the unprecedented purpose to establish pre-
rogative government on a base of taxes levied without benefit of
parliament. The purpose was defeated not by the courts or Parlia-
ment, but by the passive resistance of tax-collectors and taxpayers.
As they withdrew their obedience the prerogative grew weaker, un-
til in 1640 it was brought down by a breath of rebellion.

69

The Passing of Tudor England, 16031660

was rigorously enforced. A communion that had remained national
only because it had been undefined was now receiving a narrow,
Catholic definition. Between the Puritan left wing of the Church
and the Catholic right wing was a great group of moderates, clergy
and laity alike, whom Laud was driving into alliance with the left
not because they opposed the Elizabethan settlement but because
they loved it. Laud, they felt, was destroying it through the power
of the Crown. Reluctantly they faced the alternatives of conform-
ing to a ritual they detested or of attacking the prerogative itself.

Another factor alarmed them. James had been friendly with Cath-
olic Spain, his son was married to a Roman Catholic, Laud was busy
introducing what seemed like Roman practices. Were these the
signs of a Stuart plot to return the country to the papal fold? They
were not; one of the few feelings that Charles and his Archbishop
shared with the most rabid Puritan was a hatred of Rome. But all
Catholics were papists to the average Englishman, who understood
doctrine in terms of what he saw with his own eyes. The faith he
had known was changing to something strange and monstrous, and
the change was forced on him every Sunday in the parish church.

The parochial clergy were taking on new ways. They wore elabo-
rate vestments instead of sober black, and they interlarded the serv-
ice with bowings at the name of Christ. Their sermons, although un-
questionably learned, smacked of the church fathers more than of
Calvin and Melancthon; their favorite texts emphasized obedience.
A preacher might not dare to say explicitly, under the eagle eye of
the squire, that Bible-reading was dangerous, but he would prob-
ably tell stories of heretics who had misinterpreted God's word.
Worst of all, the new trend had been symbolized in a physical alter-
ation in the church. The communion table had been moved from
the entrance of the chancel to the east end, decked with damask and
a cross, and cut off from the congregation by a rail. Where previ-
ously a minister and his people had communicated together in fel-
lowship at a table, now laymen knelt at the rail while a priest
brought the elements to them from an altar. The change expressed
in a form no man could ignore the shift from a Protestant to a Cath-
olic concept of the relationship between clergy and laity. If this was
not Roman, what was?

The innovations could not be resisted. Laymen had to acquiesce
because they had no alternative to worshiping by the forms of the

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

chy had conquered neither of the forces that opposed it: the nobles
were still a power in the land, and the Kirk combined the political
dynamic of popularism with the ruthlessness of the aroused Cal-
vinist conscience. The Englishman's respect for authority, civil and
ecclesiastical, was little regarded north of Tweed.

James had been aware of this fact. He had succeeded in reimpos-
ing an episcopacy upon the Kirk, but he had been wise enough to
ride the Scots with a light rein. Bishops were unpopular. To some
they represented the earlier age of papal supremacy, to others the
subversive influence of England; the noble distrusted their increas-
ing role in government, and to the presbyter they were scouts for
the host of Midian. James's success had been more apparent than
real.

Charles could not distinguish appearance from reality. He blun-
dered in handling the Scots as his father never would have done,
partly because he lacked James's shrewdness and partly because his
upbringing had divorced him from the Scottish background of his
House. By 1636 he convinced himself that all was going smoothly
in England, and that the Kirk should be fitted to the Laudian pat-
tern. A new order of service for Scotland was accordingly drawn up
in London. The Scots were not consulted. The prayer book was to
be imposed upon them by royal fiat operating through the bishops,
and Charles assumed obedience.

The assumption was gross folly. To introduce a Laudian disci-
pline into the Kirk was to thrust a torch into a powder-barrel. No-
bles and presbyters were united in their jealousy of the bishops; pa-
triots resented English interference; Calvinists saw behind the
prelates and Laud the satanic face of Rome. On the Sunday in 1637
when the new service was to be read from every pulpit, Scotland ex-
ploded in revolt. The King's authority collapsed, and the repercus-
sions in England were fatal to his rule.

Charles governed essentially by prestige, which is fragile. He
could not maintain die prerogative of divine right in one kingdom
while he capitulated to defiance in the other; he had to suppress the
rebellion. But he could not. Long negotiations only revealed the gulf
of misunderstanding between him and the Scots, and he was power-
less to fight them. They were united and belligerent, led by veterans
of the German wars; he had no army worth the name and no means
of improvising one. He dared not risk a battle. Neither did the Scots,

73

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

While StrafFord schemed and labored, the Scots sat quiet in the
north. They had advanced as far as Newcastle, forced the King to
accept their terms, and agreed to retire when he furnished them
with a large indemnity; until then they demanded their expenses.
This arrangement was shrewd business and shrewder statecraft.
After the meeting of the Short Parliament the invaders knew that
the House of Commons was their ally against prerogative, and they
wished to force Charles to call Parliament again. This could be done
more efficiently by appropriating the remnants of his cash, than by
attacking his tatterdemalion army. So the Scots remained.

The King was in check, and he had only one move. His writs
went out, and in November his last Parliament met the Long Par-
liament, which destroyed the monarchy, the church, and then itself.
The game was up, as Charles had played it for eleven years. He
could not dissolve the Houses again because the Scots at Newcastle
guarded the members at Westminster. The situation was out of his
control, and the initiative passed inevitably to the commons.

V The Fall of the Monarchy

THE LONG Parliament, when it met, was united against everything
for which the King stood. Nobility, gentry, and burgesses were de-
termined to curb the prerogative, whether in taxation, the courts, or
the Church, and the outstanding agents of prerogative stood in dan-
ger of their lives. At that moment civil war was impossible; virtually
everyone was against the King. This opposition disintegrated, dur-
ing the next eighteen years, into many warring factions, and the
process is the central fact in the history of the revolution. First the
ranks of Parliament were split in two, and civil war ensued. The vic-
tors then fought each other over the fruits of victory, and one group
triumphed only to break apart. In the end a small minority was rul-
ing the islands by military force. Thus government by the sole pre-
rogative of the Crown led, through revolution, to government by the
sole prerogative of the sword. The sequence was so instructive that
the British never needed another lesson.

At the beginning the vast majority of the members of Parliament
were moderate royalists, who thought and spoke in terms of prece-
dent, not of revolution. Their basic aim was little different from that
of their predecessors in 1629: to establish a balanced constitution.

75

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

by definition a crime against the King. In this case Charles had pat-
ently sanctioned the acts of his servant, which therefore could not
be treasonable. The prosecution endeavored to establish that trea-
son to the nation was a crime, but this legal innovation the peers
refused to accept. At bottom Charles, not Strafford, was on trial,
and the law took no cognizance of wrongs done to the state by the
head of state.

The peers intended to act as judges, not as politicians who feared
and detested the Earl. Time was pressing; at court a plot was under
way to use the nondescript army for a coup d'etat. The commons
therefore dropped the impeachment and substituted a bill of at-
tainder, which was in effect a joint resolution of both Houses con-
demning the accused to death without trial. Such legislative murder
had not been perpetrated for almost a century; but news of the army
plot alarmed the lords, and the bill went through. The last hurdle
was the King. An attainder, unlike an impeachment, required his sig-
nature. This could be extorted only by force, and for the first time
force was used. The palace was besieged by the mob, howling for
the head of the Queen the foreigner, the papist, the instigator of
the army plot. Charles at last gave -way, out of fear for his wife,
and the next day Strafford died.

His death may have been necessary. But many moderates were
disturbed at the revival of attainder and deeply shocked at coercion
of the King. They felt revolution in the air, and instinctively they
moved closer to the court. Strafford thus left his master a parting
gift, the beginnings of a royalist party. As the great pendulum of
change swung leftward, this party grew into an army.

Parliament was destroying the institutions as well as the agents of
Charles's personal rule. The prerogative courts were abolished, and
the tenure of the remaining judges made dependent solely on their
good behavior; ship money was outlawed, customs duties brought
under parliamentary control, and the ordinary revenue reduced to a
shadow; frequent parliaments were made obligatory, and the Crown
even lost for a time its power of dissolution without consent of both
Houses. These reforms were passed with virtual unanimity; moder-
ates joined with radicals in clipping the wings of secular prerogative
once and for all.

The Church was another matter. Here a cleavage developed that
did more than any other factor to prepare the way for civil war.

77

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

kingship represented the continuity of the nation's past and present.
In the authority exercised by those institutions he saw the cohesive
force without -which the nation dissolves.

He was acclimated to paternalism. In most cases he came from the
gentry, a class that still dominated the communal life of the coun-
tryside, and he still thought in terms not far removed from the
feudal. He was trained to social and political responsibility for the
welfare of those below him, and he instinctively accepted the king's
responsibility for the welfare of all. However much he might resent
particular activities of the Crown, he did not, like the Puritan, dis-
trust government in itself. Respect for the powers that be was the
foundation on which his own power rested.

He had on his side the force of old loyalties. The country folk, for
the most part, were indifferent to the theoretical claims of king and
commons; their habit of obedience was ingrained, and the name of
majesty was still one to conjure with. Their religion was not Puri-
tanical but that of an earlier age, consonant both with superstition
and with boisterous revels after Sunday service. The time was draw-
ing to an end, as the ballad-maker realized,

When Tom came home from labor,

Or Ciss to milking rose,
Then merrily went their tabor,

And nimbly went their toes. 6

But the end was not yet. Until it came, the Cavalier with his so-
ciability, his exuberance in living, his sense of authority could
touch die hearts of the common people as the Puritan never could.
If the cause of Parliament drew on new forces, that of the King
drew on the strength of Tudor England.

The Civil War was thus a struggle between two attitudes of mind.
The Roundheads, who were largely Puritans, fought against the
ubiquitous power of the Crown, whether exercised in religious, po-
litical, or economic terms; they agreed in emphasizing the freedom
of the individual as against the prerogative, although they were not
agreed on how much freedom to allow in a government dominated
by themselves. The royalists, who were preponderantly Cavaliers,
supported the Crown because they believed that prescriptive au-
thority was the only protection from chaos. The issue was funda-

Percy's Reliques, n, 320.

81

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

forces. In the counties of East Anglia a new kind of army had been
taking form under the hand of a local squire, Oliver Cromwell. His
soldiers fused religious with military enthusiasm; their faith was so
direct that they scorned the shackles of a church, and they were as
impatient of Presbyterian rigidity as of Cavalier extravagance. Their
discipline, the admiration of professionals, was largely self-enf orced.
Because of their beliefs they were known as Independents; because
of their strength in battle they were known as Ironsides.

The importance of Cromwell rose with that of his army. Like most
Roundhead leaders he was a reluctant revolutionary. For all his op-
position to the episcopal system he had a gentleman's respect for
monarchy; he was no more a democrat than a Laudian. But he saw
no alternative to breaking the military power of the King, and he
devoted himself to the task with the efficiency of a whole heart.
Even though his humor saved him from the dourness so common
among Puritans, none of them had a deeper sense of divine guid-
ance. If he was called upon to destroy, he would search his soul and
then destroy. The Lord was the designer and he the instrument.

By 1645 the instrument had shown its power. The King's forces
were shattered beyond repair, and in the next year the war ended.
Cromwell was not yet in titular command of the victors; that posi-
tion was held a revealing commentary on the rebellion by a
peer of the realm, Lord Fairfax. But Cromwell had made success
possible, and it projected him inevitably into political prominence.
He was no Bonaparte, forcing his way from the camp to the council
table; like many of his fellow-officers he was an active member of
Parliament between campaigns, for the line between generals and
politicians had not yet been drawn in this most civilian of revolu-
tions. Four years of campaigning, however, had left their mark on
him. He was less patient and more authoritarian than the squire
who had gone home from Westminster to raise Cambridgeshire
against the King. Triumph in battle was a heady wine for the Puri-
tan commander. It not only brought him prestige and political influ-
ence; it also meant that his enemies stood convicted of sin, and that
he had been the agent of a judgment by the Lord of Hosts. "Be-
cause of those things cometh the wrath of God upon the children
of disobedience." 9

Cromwell and his comrades were flushed with the wine of suc-

9 Ephesians 5. 6.

83

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

sides, hoping that one or the other would restore him to a vestige o
power in return for the use of his name. This time he was risking
his lif e.

The common soldiers had little use for his name. Radicals were
carrying their ideas of individual freedom from religion to politics:
"the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest
he/* and should therefore have a voice in choosing the government. 10
Such notions of democracy were anathema to many of the officers,
Cromwell and Fairfax among them, but even their prestige could
not reconcile the dissidents among the rank and file to negotiating
with the King.

Many Presbyterians, in Scotland and to a lesser extent in England,
were more responsive. They had never intended to create a republic,
let alone a democracy, and the rise of radicalism scared them. The
initiators of a revolution rarely finish it; as the focus shifts to the
left, they become alarmed at what they have started and often end
as counterrevolutionaries. So with these Presbyterians of 1648. They
had achieved their ends only to find their church, their power, and
even their property menaced by the radicals. They could keep what
they had gained only by defending the monarchy that they them-
selves had shorn of its strength.

This split within the nucleus of the revolution led to another civil
war. On one side were Scots, some English Presbyterians, the King,
and a few indomitable Cavaliers; on the other was the army of In-
dependents. Dissension split both camps. Charles had sacrificed one
of his few remaining principles by agreeing to the temporary estab-
lishment of Presbyterianism in England, and so had alienated the
Anglicans. The army leaders, for their part, had become involved
most unwillingly; their hand had been forced in part by pressure
from the ranks, in part by the King's double dealing. They stood be-
tween the devil of Presbyterian intolerance and the deep sea of radi-
calism in their followers. Their only course was to destroy the devil
and then to build dikes against the sea.

The first task was easily accomplished. Their opponents had little
military force south of Tweed, and a Scots invasion was crushed in
a single battle; the English phase of the war collapsed at once. The
victors had then to secure their victory. They did so in a mood quite

10 Quoted by G. M. Trevdyan: England under the Stuarts (London and
New York, 1928), p. 282.

85

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever. But . . .
their liberty and freedom consists in having government, those laws
by which their lives and goods may be most their own. It is not their
having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining to
them. A subject and a sovereign are clear different things."

The Cavalier feeling for sovereignty could not have been better
put. Charles took his final stand not on prerogative but on the basic
need for authority. The new democratic premise would make every
subject a sovereign, and so would negate authority itself by pro-
ducing a state of anarchy in which the rights of the individual
would lose all meaning; "liberty and freedom consists in having gov-
ernment." This was the argument on which the King rested his de-
fense, and at the time it was unanswerable. His enemies, soon after
they had taken his life, were forced to appropriate his logic.

VI "Sword Government'*

BY the King's execution the Independents crossed the Rubicon.
Thereafter they had to go ahead because they had nowhere else to
go; a regicide who falters or turns back pays with his head. Their
road was appallingly difficult. They had to deal with the Scots and
the still-rebellious Irish, regain colonial allegiance, and establish re-
spect for themselves in Europe. This part of their task was not for
the faint-hearted; it required force directed by a single, unrelenting
will required the army, the navy, and Cromwell. That new con-
stitutional trinity achieved its purpose.

But much more was needed. A government for Great Britain, al-
though it could be improvised by soldiers, could not rest perma-
nently on them. It had to be made acceptable to the governed, and
for that purpose force and will were insufficient; they might com-
mand respect, but not consent. The Puritan regime was coercive at
its core, and for that reason it could not win consent. At the first sign
that its strength was failing, the country would shake- it off. This
was Cromwell's greatest problem, and it was insoluble. The tran-
sience of his government was predetermined by the way it had
come to power.

The steps by which the regime advanced to its fall are far less
significant than the ways in which it used its force during the brief
decade of its prime. Those ways left their mark on British history,

8?

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

left only some four thousand "sanctified creatures who hardly ever
saw or heard of any sword but that of the spirit." 12 Yet these saints
should have been victorious on military as well as theological
grounds; instead they were overwhelmingly defeated. In 1651 the
Scots took heart again and invaded England; their army was anni-
hilated at Worcester. Cromwell had extinguished the royalist cause
for his lifetime, and in the process he had dealt a lethal blow to
the power of the Kirk. Dunbar and Worcester were a sign for Scot-
land, as the defeat of the Armada had been for Spain, that the God
of Battles had withdrawn His support. To the practical Scot such
desertion suggested that presbyters might not be the unique instru-
ment of deity. He remembered and mused upon the warning which
had come from Cromwell before Dunbar: **I beseech you in the
bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

The settlement of Scotland was wholly unlike that of Ireland. The
Scots were no Canaanites to be exterminated, but erring brothers to
be brought firmly back to the fold. The country was soon incorpor-
ated with England and Wales into a single state. The Scots received
generous parliamentary representation, free trade with England, a
good judicial system, and a limited freedom of worship; they thus
had a new world forced upon them at sword's point, and for six
years they were compelled to experience the benefits of collaborat-
ing with England. Those benefits were remembered half a century
later, but at the time they -were hated because they were imposed.
No system dictated by a foreigner, whether Charles or Cromwell,
could be acceptable north of Tweed.

Although force did not win consent, it achieved much. Ireland
was pacified and shackled to England for more than two centuries
to come; Scotland was driven into co-operation. Simultaneously the
colonial empire was reduced to obedience, and Europe was taught
respect for the regicide government. This was the work of the navy,
which for the first time emerged as a major instrument of policy.
The Elizabethans had learned to fight at sea, but they had not had
the rudiments of an offensive fleet. The Puritans created one and
demonstrated its uses. This achievement, far more than their vic-
tories on land, made their regime a milestone on the British road to
power.

" Quoted by A. F. Pollard: Factors in Modern History (New York, 1907),
p. 199.

8 9

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

The Tudors and Stuarts had long labored over the first stage, to
increase the nation's trade. But they had not had the strength for
the second because the navy had been at best defensive. The Puri-
tans had a fleet capable of assuming and sustaining the attack, and
they were quick to use it. They inaugurated a series of wars that
lasted for more than a century and a half, and extended British
power into the farthest reaches of the world.

Mercantilism was no respecter of religious or political sympa-
thies. The Navigation Act of 1651, which confined English imports
to the ships of England, her colonies, or the country of origin, was
aimed primarily at the Dutch Netherlands. The Elizabethan tie
with the Dutch and the fact that they were now republicans and
the leading Protestant power of the Continent were nothing, in the
eyes of Parliament, beside the fact that they were the carriers of Eu-
rope. The act gave them the alternatives of surrendering a part of
their trade or of fighting for it, and they chose to fight. The war was
brief, fierce, and decisive. The Dutch began it with an unsurpassed
fleet and merchant marine; twenty-two months later they sued for
peace on Cromwell's terms. The tide of their power had turned, al-
though the ebb was not fully apparent until after another genera-
tion and two more wars with England.

The triumph of the Commonwealth was not due primarily to its
seamen. Blake was one of the great admirals of history, and he was
ably seconded by another soldier, George Monk; but the two met
their equals in Tromp and de Ruyter. The principal weakness of the
Netherlands was her strategic position. To guard her land frontiers
she required an army that diverted resources from the fleet; to reach
the Atlantic her trade had to run the British gantlet, whereas she
could not effectively blockade British trade. The war thus revealed
the two basic factors at the root of British sea power, the freedom
to concentrate on naval force and the favorable position of the
home islands.

Victory left Cromwell's government, eager for prestige and profit,
with a fleet that was an almost irresistible incentive to aggression.
The victim selected was Spain, who had by now grown weak
enough to be tempting. In 1655 an expedition to the Spanish West
Indies captured Jamaica, and the British obtained their first major
foothold in the central Caribbean. At the same time their fleets were
patrolling the Mediterranean, where they had a gratifying effect on

91

The Passing of Tudor England) 1603-1660

mined what was or was not for the good of the governed, whose role
was obedience. The revolution thus came full circle. It began as a
movement against the narrow authoritarianism of the King; it cul-
minated in an authoritarianism equally narrow, sanctioned by the
sword instead of by prescription. For Cromwell in practice, as for
Charles in practice and theory, "a subject and a sovereign are clear
different things."

The inevitable result, for one man as for the other, was the isola-
tion of his regime. Cromwell's power rested initially upon the In-
dependents, but even this minority was soon torn by dissension. On
the extreme left were the Diggers, who wished to substitute for the
old social order an agrarian and Christian form of communism. Less
radical but more dangerous were the Levellers, or democrats, who
demanded government by the people instead of usurpation by the
military. The Diggers were suppressed with little trouble; their
ideas outraged the social instincts of the squirearchy, and monarch-
ists for once saw eye to eye with republicans. The Levellers were
a more thorny problem.

The logic of Independency, indeed of the whole Puritan move-
ment, pointed to some form of democracy. In an age when religion
and politics were still fused, the view that authority in a church de-
rived from the individual suggested the same view about the state.
This popularism was consonant with dictatorship, theocratic or Eras-
tian, only if the dictatorial power were deputed to Kirk or Common-
wealth by the governed. That condition could not be satisfied in
practice; a free election would have destroyed the Cromwellian re-
gime. Many of the original Independents, whose thinking was un-
trammeled by the responsibilities of office, were eager to implement
their democratic theories and impatient of military control. "We
were ruled before by king, lords, and commons," they said, "now by
a general, court martial, and commons, and we pray you what is the
difference?" ls Such questions stripped the cloak of legality from the
soldier's armor.

These Levellers had one outstanding spokesman. "Freeborn John"
Lilburne was the embodiment of Puritan dissent, a man who op-
posed -whatever government tried to rule him. He had suffered for
defying the Thing's prerogative, but he was no more ready for that
reason to accept Cromwell in place of Charles. In 1649 and 1653 he

Quoted by Gooch: History of Democratic Ideas, p. 198.

93

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

ceeded him, had the wits to recognize his own incompetence; he re-
signed, and the passing of "Tumbledown Dick" went almost unre-
garded in the mounting anarchy. The army officers quarreled among
themselves until at last George Monk, who had returned from sea to
command in Scotland, decided that the time had come "to see my
country freed from that intolerable slavery of a sword government."
He marched on London, reinstated the Rump, added the members
expelled in 1648, and then persuaded this ghost of the Long Parlia-
ment to dissolve itself. For the first time since 1640 a virtually free
election was held, and the result was foreordained. Soon after the
new Parliament met, King Charles II was publicly proclaimed.
Three weeks later he entered London.

The Restoration, unlike the revolution it ended, was not achieved
by force. The army had disintegrated, and the revolution with it;
Britain was faced with the alternatives of monarchy or chaos, and
the first had to be arranged hastily before the second supervened.
Haste precluded any attempt at a thorough, final settlement of the
questions raised in the past two decades. Charles was asked, and
agreed, to return on the basis of an amnesty to rebels and "a liberty
to tender consciences'* in matters of religion; but the definition of
these terms on which everything depended was left to a future
parliament. At the moment of the Restoration the needs of the mo-
ment made a settlement impossible.

Only one phase of the revolution ended when Charles stepped
ashore, the phase that had begun in 1629 with government by pre-
rogative and had led through civil war to government by force. Dur-
ing that phase ideas had come to the fore about almost every aspect
of religion, society, and government. Some, such as Laud's concept
of the church or the Diggers* views of common land, were never
tried again. Others, such as divine right, endured for generations to
come. Still others, such as the Levellers* notions of democracy or
the Independents* theories of religious freedom, burrowed under the
years and came to light in the nineteenth century. In one sense the
revolution never ended: the subsequent history of the British peo-
ple, at home and overseas, has been a running commentary upon
the questions it raised.

Certain major points, however, had been settled by 1660, and
their settlement determined the future growth of the constitution,
of the Church, and of Britain's military power. Government by the

95

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

dom at home. If James II, or even George III, bad had at his dis-
posal a large force of professionals, divorced from the population
and trained to obey rather than think, the course of British history
might have been diverted. But the work of Monk never needed to
be done again. The nation reverted permanently to its old tradi-
tion, of a government that had to depend on consent because it
lacked force.

The Puritan fleet was force of another kind. It could not, in its
nature, overawe the landlubbing bulk of the population; it could
and did excite their self-importance by coercing the foreigner. The
maritime wars of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, unpopular
as they were at times, established a new and popular concept of
naval power. The empire was held together and expanded at the
cost of Spain; British mercantilists saw gains to themselves in the
losses of the Dutch; the Mediterranean and the Caribbean ap-
peared as foci of future interest. The Puritans, in short, made the
army an object of distrust for centuries to come, and thereby en-
sured the pre-eminence of the navy; at the same time they trans-
formed the latter into an effective, professional force and demon-
strated how to use it offensively. In these ways, intended and
unintended, Cromwell and his fellows set an enduring pattern for
the future.

97

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

Charles was half French in blood and first cousin to Louis. His
mother, Henrietta Maria, had helped to make him more than half
French in his way of thought and a Roman Catholic by secret incli-
nation; he always admired the state that Louis personified and the
church that he championed. Charles shared his cousin's taste for the
pleasures of kingship but not for its hard work; he detested business.
Partly because of his Gallic wit and his sense of humor, partly be-
cause his tenure of the British throne was insecure, he did not grow
inflated with Louis* majestic self-importance. Although he made
sporadic efforts to refashion his government on French absolutist
lines, his one overriding purpose was to preserve his crown and
enjoy it.

This "tall man, above two yards high," as the Puritans had de-
scribed him during the man-hunt after Worcester, was as much a
stranger to the British as his father had been. There the resem-
blance ends. Charles II had what his father and grandfather lacked,
a superb political mind, although it was usually veiled by an indo-
lence that his opponents were likely to mistake for incompetence.
His private life was notorious, and his diplomacy sometimes bor-
dered on the treasonable. But he retained his grip on power for a
quarter of a century because, when he exerted himself, he was a
match for the shrewdest politicians in Britain and Europe.

The problems confronting him on his return required a skillful
and subtle hand. The acts of the Long Parliament that his father had
signed those passed before the breach of 1641 were acknowl-
edged as binding, and the acknowledgment stripped from the
Crown much of its former prerogative. Its ordinary revenue was
stabilized, at long last, by an agreement resembling the Great Con-
tract of fifty years before: the King surrendered his feudal dues in
return for a fixed grant, impressive on paper but actually insufficient
for the routine needs of government. Charles remained financially
dependent on the commons, and they soon developed techniques of
scrutinizing his expenditure. They were groping half-consciously
for control of the executive, but it eluded their grasp.

Much of the initiative in making policy, and the entire adminis-
tration of it, remained perforce with the King. Until the commons
developed an executive instrument to carry out their will, they could
only block measures proposed by the Crown and occasionally force
on it measures of their own. The principle of their supremacy,

99

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

by any but Anglican forms; if the outsiders were not forced back
into a national communion, Parliament calculated, they would be
condemned to political insignificance. Many men, Presbyterians and
Independents alike, refused to be forced and paid the price in civil
liberties. This minority came to be known as the dissenters. They
were far from insignificant, and they were potential allies for any-
one who opposed the regime. In cutting the church to its own nar-
row cloth the House of Commons laid up trouble for generations to
come.

The dissenters were not the only ostracized minority. The recu-
sants still survived, and they took hope from the return of the Stu-
arts at a moment when France was in the ascendant. Charles was
not hostile to their faith, and his brother James, the heir presump-
tive, made no secret of his leaning toward it. The situation resem-
bled in some ways that of a century before: Louis, like Philip, was
the recusants* patron and the most powerful figure in Europe, and
the heir to the throne was their co-religionist. If Charles was no
Elizabeth, so much the better for their hopes.

By the late 166(Ts Charles was in fact considering a scheme to
establish absolutism with his cousin's assistance. Louis would have
to be paid, presumably by subordinating Britain both to Rome and
Versailles, but the price deterred Charles less than the chance that
his plans might misfire and destroy him. In order to weigh that
chance, while he still had time to turn back, he experimented with
the temper of his subjects.

Much of the material for his experiments was provided by inter-
national developments. In retrospect the cardinal development was
the rising power of France, but at the time Charles's subjects were
more intent on their feud with the Dutch. Britain and the Nether-
lands, the two powers that had cause and means to oppose French
aggression, were reaching for each other's throats, and their quarrel
came close to giving Louis the hegemony of Europe.

The second Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1665 and lasted for
two years. In North America the Dutch lost their settlements on
the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, and New Amsterdam became
New York; in Britain, however, the war seemed appallingly mis-
managed, and Lord Clarendon was impeached and driven into ex-
ile. In Europe Louis seized his chance to attack the Spanish Nether-
lands (substantially modern Belgium), a sensitive point for both

101

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 16601763

detested even more than tibeir former restrictions. The commons
were up in arms. The constitutional issue of their relationship with
the Crown was again fused, as in the 1620*s, with issues of foreign
policy and the Church. Parliament first forced the King to withdraw
the declaration, then passed the Test Act, which was aimed at the
recusants but struck equally at dissent: no one might hold civil or
military office under the Crown unless he was a communicant of
the Church of England. The disabilities of the Clarendon Code
were thereby extended from local to national government, and the
Anglican monopoly of power was completed.

The Test Act and the Code before it were the work of Parliament
alone. The King opposed both, for different reasons, and in each
case he was overborne. Thenceforth the Crown was only in name
the head of a national church. In fact the establishment ceased to
be either national or royal, and became the preserve of an Anglican
squirearchy entrenched in the House of Commons. The old Cava-
liers had fought for a system and a liturgy they loved, and their
formula had been James's, "no bishop, no king." The new Cavaliers
used the communion service as the shibboleth of a ruling class; their
implicit formula became "no bishop, no squire," which for centuries
remained an unspoken tenet of the oligarchy. Charles's experiment
in toleration served only to strengthen Anglicanism against both dis-
sent and the Crown.

His experiment in foreign policy met as rough a reception. The
war was unpopular, and in 1674 Parliament forced the King to
make peace; the two decades of Anglo-Dutch hostilities were over.
Charles learned his lesson gracefully. He abandoned his earlier am-
bitions and contented himself with playing off Parliament against
Louis as sources of revenue: from the former he asked for subsi-
dies with which to build up Britain's military force, from the latter
for subsidies to keep the military idle. The game was risky. The
truth of his dealings with Versailles would goad his subjects to fury,
and his cousin, if pressed too far, might at any time reveal the
truth. But the game was also to Charles's taste because it gave him
a measure of precarious independence.

Peace with the Netherlands was a far cry from hostility to France.
By 1674 few Englishmen grasped the fact that Britain's security was
a function of the Continental balance of power and was menaced
by French expansion. During the next fourteen years awareness

103

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

children, however, and by an earlier marriage he had two Protestant
daughters, Mary and Anne. Mary had recently married William of
Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, who was the leader of the
Protestant cause on the Continent and Louis' most dangerous en-
emy. William, himself half Stuart on his mother's side, was his wife's
first cousin, and he and Mary were the presumptive successors after
James. 2

The nub of the problem was James's recusancy. Charles at least
remained a nominal Anglican; James was either more honest or
more stupid, depending on the point of view, and his accession car-
ried with it the threat of popery at home and subordination to
France abroad. His claim was upheld by the King and by a large
group in Parliament, but the opposition was almost as strong and
at least as determined.

The Duke's supporters argued that accepting him was a lesser
evil than debarring him. He was already in his forties, and in all
likelihood his reign would mean only a Roman-Catholic interlude
in the dynasty before William and Mary restored it to Protestantism.
The opposition argued that a papist king backed by France was too
great a menace to countenance even temporarily, and that either the
crown must be deprived of its prerogative when James received it
or he must be deprived of the crown. Either course would amount
to revolution. The defenders of the existing order rallied to the
dynasty; they received and accepted the name of Tory, and James's
opponents the name of Whig. Thus the issue of a recusant heir,
gathering to itself many other issues, completed the split of the po-
litical world into the two great parties of modern British history.

The Tory's position owed much to the Cavaliers of a generation
before. Monarchy for him was the symbol of social order, and a
king's religious vagaries were insignificant beside the value of main-
taining the legal succession. The Tory was 'no friend of the Jesuits

2 In genealogical terms, the problem before the country in 1678 was as fol-
lows (immediate contenders for the succession are italicized):

Charles I : Henrietta Maria

Ch axles II
Monmouth

Mary : William Anne : (l)J0mes(2) : Mary
j 1

WiUiam of Orange : Mary
105

Anne

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

elgner and head of the state with which Britain had fought her
three most recent wars, and as a candidate for the throne he would
be a liability to the Whigs.

They were under another disadvantage. An attempt to change the
succession was sure to be resisted by the King and the Tories to
the point of war, and the fear of civil war had been bred into men's
thoughts. A crisis would bring the timid, the cautious, and the unde-
cided to the support of the Crown. They had seen -what happened
when fighting started and would dread repeating the experience; to
many of them even a papist on the throne was better than another
Cromwell and his major-generals. For several years the Whigs
waited while their anxieties grew. Their fear of France was height-
ened by Louis* continuing war against the Dutch, their fear of Rome
by rumors that the Jesuits were at work under the protection of the
English court. The cause of Protestantism was under attack from
within and without, and British liberties were staked upon it.

In 1678 the Whigs* fear spread suddenly to the people at large,
and exploded in the frenzy of the Popish Plot. The plot existed pri-
marily in the mind of an informer named Titus Gates, one of the
outstanding liars of history. The "revelations'* of his inventive brain
convinced the timorous and credulous that the Jesuits intended to
burn London, raise the Irish in revolt, murder the King, and im-
pose their faith on Britain with the help of French bayonets. Gates
was firing his arrows of suspicion almost at random. But some
struck in a dangerous quarter, where the secrets of the court were
hidden. James's secretary was found to have been in treasonable
correspondence with France, and a magistrate with whom Gates
had left his accusations was mysteriously murdered. These devel-
opments upset even the level-headed, and touched off a witch-hunt
for Jesuits and recusants.

Charles was at last confronted with the results of his devious pol-
icy. He had entertained and abandoned a design little different
from the Popish Plot, and bolder spirits had carried on when he
turned back; reports of their strange doings had prepared the way
for an outburst of hysteria. The charges that had actually provoked
the outburst were a blend of fancy and distorted fact; they could
neither be admitted nor circumstantially denied.

Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies,
To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise,

107

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

brother as their safeguard against anarchy. Although their dislike of
recusants was held in leash by their loyalty to James, they were al-
lowed a vicious persecution of Whigs and dissenters. So they per-
suaded themselves that they were still defending the two great arti-
cles of the Cavalier faith, the monarchy and the Church.

This Indian summer of Toryism was ephemeral in its essence.
Charles's position depended on French subsidies and the mainte-
nance of neutrality. His supporters, at bottom, were little more
friendly to France than the Whigs, and Louis* aggressions on the
Continent were making neutrality more and more dangerous; the
long era of British isolation was ending. Even the Tories accepted
popery only on sufferance. If it became an open threat at home or
from France, their allegiance to the throne would waver. Charles's
rule, in short, taxed the skill of even that master politician. When
he died in 1685, the skill vanished.

Ill The Conservative Revolution

CHARLES had once referred to the time when he would leave the
crown "a la sottise de son frdre" The phrase would have shocked
the reverential Tories; but it was the judgment of a keen observer,
who knew his brother far better than they did. The new King was
earnest, methodical, devout; he was also one of the most -unintelli-
gent sovereigns in English history. He resembled his Roman-Catholic
predecessor, Mary Tudor, in his dogged pursuit of policy regardless
of obstacles, and in his blindness to public opinion. But he was liv-
ing in a far more critical world, in which opposition germinated
overnight. Where Mary faced a rebellion and numerous riots during
her five years on the throne, James took three years to produce a
revolution.

He attempted to establish absolutism and Roman Catholicism
to do what his brother had tentatively tried and abandoned more
than a decade before, and to do it without the active support of
Louis. The possibility of success was so remote, the risk so obvious,
that the attempt seems from a distance like madness. It was in fact
merely the work of a stupid man deceived by adulation. When the
Tories proclaimed in the press and pulpit the duty of nonresistance,
of obedience to the will of God's anointed, James assumed that they
meant what they said. By acting on the assumption he forced them

109

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

precedence over his half-sisters, and his birth meant that the legiti-
mate Stuart line might continue Roman Catholic forever. The acci-
dent of a baby's sex had converted the Tory principle of heredity
into a Tory nightmare. To rid the nation of this incubus the party at
last joined hands with the Whigs.

Monmouth's death had greatly simplified the problem of replac-
ing James. Mary and her husband were now the only possibility;
William was no more popular than he had been, but his wife re-
fused to be considered without him. A few weeks after the birth of
the King's son Whig and Tory leaders invited the Prince of Orange
to cross from Holland to England, ostensibly to discuss the new sit-
uation. Actually his coming meant revolution.

William was no Monmouth. He was a calculating politician, sea-
soned by crises at home, and for fifteen years he had been building
coalitions against the power of France. In the summer of 1688 Louis
was organizing a new and greater war of aggression that could only
be checked by a new and greater alliance. William was playing for
more than a crown. If he replaced James, the weight of Britain
would be added for the first time to his Continental alignment
against France. His crossing the Channel meant not merely an over-
turn in domestic British politics, but also a reversal of British for-
eign policy and a shift in the scales of European power.

The British themselves were at last ready for the reversal. Bour-
bon absolutism no longer had its admirers except at court. Louis* re-
cent persecution of the French Huguenots, dramatized by the atroc-
ity stories of refugees, waked slumbering memories. Mercantilists
were alarmed by French commercial and colonial expansion, and
politicians were coming to realize that Louis' ambition to achieve
the "natural frontier" of the Rhine touched Britain's interests. These
factors made war feasible; the domestic situation made it inevitable.
William's coming, which necessitated intervention abroad, was the
only way to preserve the church and constitution at home. Louis
blundered badly. He might have kept William busy in the Nether-
lands or intercepted him at sea; instead he did nothing. He hoped
that a civil war in England would leave the Dutch leaderless and
the British impotent, but he miscalculated his cousin's fiber. James
lacked the courage of his earlier days. Once William was ashore
and marching on London, the King bolted for France like a scared
rabbit. His arrival must have occasioned more surprise than pleas-

iii

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

The rights and privileges of Parliament were confirmed, and pre-
cautions were taken against royal packing or corruption of the
Lower House. The King's power to suspend or dispense with statute
was abolished. The consent of Parliament was thenceforth neces-
sary to remove a judge or to maintain a standing army in time of
peace. The Tory doctrine of nonresistance was outlawed. The prin-
ciple was recognized that the descent of the crown depended not
upon accidents of heredity but upon the decision of Parliament.
Thus the center of power was shifted, once and for all, from the sov-
ereign to the legislature. No king thereafter could defy the will of
the commons and retain his throne.

The revolution also stopped, until the nineteenth century, the en-
croachment of central power upon local autonomy. James's effort to
dominate the boroughs had produced much the same reaction as his
father's attempted paternalism, and this time the burgesses and their
cousins the squires sectored a more sweeping victory. The King's
dethronement confirmed their power in the localities and vastly
strengthened their role at Westminster. In the eighteenth century,
when that role became predominant and one class controlled almost
the whole of government, localism triumphed over centralization.

On its religious side the revolutionary settlement contained a
principle new to the constitution a declaration of the rights of
dissent known as the Toleration Act. This statute was passed in 1689,
over Tory opposition, by the combined efforts of the Whigs and
Kong William. It was in part a payment to the dissenters for refusing
the blandishments of James. It was also a reflection, within narrow
limits, of a fundamental change in the climate of opinion.

The Independents* ideal of toleration had been the hallmark of a
minority. The Presbyterians had rejected it as vehemently as the
Anglicans, and the Cromwellian regime had been unable to apply it
fully; tolerance of intolerance leads only to trouble. The ideal
seemed to have been extinguished by the acts of the Cavalier Parlia-
ment, but under the surface of politics it was being carried forward
by the intellectual cum c the times a current that Cromwell
and Milton, Charles I ant. . ,aud, would have regarded as diabolic,
yet which was forming the modern mind. The Clarendon Code and
the Test Act were the expressions of an older way of thought; the
Toleration Act was the first harbinger of a new.

The new attitude had diverse causes. One was weariness. In the

The Trmmph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

thought, one passionately religious and therefore explosive, and the
other skeptical and self-contained. The last great outpourings of the
Puritan soul, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress, were followed
within a few years by Newton's Principia. While Milton and Bun-
yan moved in the twilight of the older world, Newton and his fellows
of the Royal Society were in the sunrise of the age of reason. Since
politics were not made by the Royal Society, the political effect was
slow. But it was also sure, and the Toleration Act was its first im-
portant fruit.

The terms of the act were a compromise between the two worlds.
Freedom of worship was extended for the first time to virtually ev-
ery Protestant. But this was all, at least in theory. The act did not
include recusants, and it did not extend to the civil and political
rights of dissenters. The Clarendon Code and the Test Act remained
on the books for almost a century and a half to come. But their
provisions were increasingly honored in the breach, and even the
lot of recusants improved as the memory of King James grew fainter.
Religious issues gradually sank into bogeys with which conserva-
tives might occasionally terrify the electorate, but which had lost
both the grandeur and the ferocity of an earlier day.

Only in Ireland, where religion had become the cloak for other
hatreds, did ferocity continue. The Cromwellian settlement had been
modified at the Restoration, when the royalism of the Anglo-Irish
recusants had been rewarded and an unstable balance of power es-
tablished between them and the Puritan usurpers. James had upset
the balance by encouraging the Catholics, and he soon tried to use
them to recover his throne. When he landed in Ireland with a small
French army, they rallied to his support. But William soon came to
the rescue of the beleaguered Protestants, and on the River Boyne,
in the summer of 1690, he met his father-in-law in the one battle of
the Bloodless Revolution. James was defeated and fled to France.
His hope of a restoration was shattered, and Irish hopes with it.

The suppression of the rising began a black period for Ireland.
The House of Commons visited punishment on the whole people,
including the Protestants. The laws against recusants were strin-
gently enforced, and the Toleration Act was not extended to the is-
land. Political power remained with the Anglican Irish entrenched
in the Dublin Parliament, a small minority of the Protestant minor-
ity. The Presbyterians of Ulster had made possible the triumph at

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

question of whether she would go forward to world power or back-
ward to insularity. By 1688 Louis* moves toward the middle Rhine
had alarmed the German princes and the emperor, and the threat to
the Low Countries had roused the Dutch and stirred the dying en-
ergies of Spain. Out of this material William was building an alli-
ance around France, and the adherence of Britain completed his
diplomatic masterpiece. But the strength of Europe arrayed against
Louis had all the weakness of coalition. The allies were short-
sighted and self-centered, while their enemy had a unified com-
mand. Their resources, even if combined, were barely a match for
his. He was safe behind impenetrable frontiers, and could strike
where and when he chose against opponents as widely separated by
geography as by their aims. William's diplomatic skill was taxed to
the limit to hold his combination together.

Only sea power could mitigate Louis* advantages by giving the
allies a measure of cohesion and mobility. The British, now that
they were embarked on their first war of coalition, had to learn to
use their fleets to open and maintain water communications around
the enemy's dominant land position. The struggle therefore marked
a new stage in the development of their naval strategy. They learned
by hard experience, and they learned faster than the French be-
cause they were more immediately dependent on their navy, Louis'
land campaigns turned his resources and attention from the sea,
and control of European waters passed before long to the British
and Dutch. The latter were progressively subordinated. Holland,
like France, was turned from the ocean by the needs of land war-
fare, and the decline in her sea power that had set in during the
Anglo-Dutch wars culminated during the Anglo-Dutch alliance.
Thereafter the British navy had only the French for a rival.

The war of the first coalition, known as the League of Augsburg,
ended in 1697. The allies succeeded in stemming the French tide,
and Louis made peace in order to prepare for a greater effort
nothing less than the acquisition of the Spanish empire. The last of
the Hapsburg kings of Spain was dying childless, and his vast in-
heritance would pass to whatever heir had the strength to make
good his title. The two major lines with hereditary claims were the
Austrian branch of the Hapsburgs and the House of Bourbon. Each
had force with which to back its lawyers" arguments, but neither
could win its case without upsetting the whole state system of Eu-

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

Netherlands and the great port of Antwerp opened to French com-
merce; Bourbon power in southern Italy where it could command
the Mediterranean; the trade of Spanish America monopolized by
France; the Franco-Spanish fleets combined, outnumbering the
Royal Navy these were some of the dangers that stared Britain
in the face. Behind them was the fundamental fact that France, if
Louis succeeded, would achieve the hegemony of western Europe
for untold generations to come. The danger was far from clear to
the average Englishman, let alone the average Scot, but it was self-
evident to the King.

William was no Britisher; he cared and understood little about
the politics of the people who had called him to their throne. In
background he was Dutch, but his innate objectivity raised him as
far above the short-sighted localism of the burghers as it did above
that of Whigs and Tories. The Stadtholder-King was a great Euro-
pean. He battled France throughout his life, not primarily because
he saw in her a threat to the profits of Amsterdam and London mer-
chants or to the civil and religious liberties of Protestants or to the
sea power of the maritime states, but because French aggression
menaced that international polity within which nations could de-
velop. This breadth of view gave William a detachment from the
quarrels and bigotries of his British subjects. It led him, into politi-
cal blunders and always kept him from popularity, but it was at the
core of his statesmanship. He served Great Britain well because, not
although, he was one of her least British sovereigns.

He answered the challenge of the Grand Monarch by forming the
Grand Alliance. Its nucleus was the three powers most concerned,
Britain, Holland, and Austria. Their geographical location, and that
of the Spanish empire in Europe, again meant division of counsel
and dispersion of force. The Dutch were intent on ousting the
French from the Spanish Netherlands, and on little else. The Haps-
burgs naturally applauded this objective because they hoped to be
sovereign in the Netherlands, but they were busy defending Aus-
tria and grabbing the Spanish possessions in Italy. The British,
alone among the allies, had an acute interest in keeping the enemy
out of Spain itself, but they lacked the army to do it. In this welter
of war aims the prime need was for some effective centripetal force.
Although William provided it initially, at the moment when hostili-
ties were opening he abruptly died; the labor of building his last al-

119

The Tritcmph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

scale naval movement into or out of the Mediterranean. The con-
quests entrenched their power in the inland sea, and opened the
quest for naval bases that eventually led them to the Falldands and
Singapore.

The conquests went largely unnoticed at the time because the
Spanish war was unsuccessful. Sea power alone could not oust the
French, and allied land power was absorbed in other theaters. In
1704 Marlborough performed an amazing march from the Nether-
lands to the Danube and shattered an enemy offensive on the field
of Blenheim. Soon afterward the Austrians ousted the French from
Italy. The allies then tried for years to invade France from the Low
Countries, where Marlborough won a series of famous but fruitless
battles; strategically the war became a stalemate. In 1711 the Arch-
duke Charles inherited the Austrian domains, and this dissolved
what little unity of counsel remained to the allies. The British and
Dutch had not been fighting for nine years to rebuild a huge Haps-
burg dynastic empire. They began hasty negotiations with Louis,
and in 1713 peace was concluded at Utrecht. In the following year
the Emperor was forced 'to accept its substance.

The Treaty of Utrecht, which established a European equilibrium
for the next eighty years, was the first of the great settlements in
which Britain played a part. Its basis was the principle of par-
tition, to which the belligerents were forced to return after eleven
years of fighting. The bulk of the Spanish empire in Europe went to
Charles of Hapsburg, and Spain itself and the overseas possessions
went to Philip of Anjou, who was recognized as King Philip V. Thus
the balance between Hapsburg and Bourbon was maintained.

The other two principals, the Netherlands and Britain, could not
share in the territorial spoils, and they were compensated in other
ways. The Dutch acquired the right to extend their defenses against
France into what had been the Spanish, and were henceforth the
Austrian, Netherlands. The British achieved some of their aims in
the terms already mentioned: the Austrian Netherlands and south-
ern Italy could not be dangerous under the weak and distant control
of Vienna. For the danger implicit in the Franco-Spanish dynastic
tie Britain received specific compensations: from France Nova Sco-
tia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay territory, and from Spain
the right known as the Asiento to supply slaves to the Spanish-
American colonies. The threat of a naval combination by the two

121

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

ing on the war, and by degrees he drifted into the Whig camp; the
Queen went with him, largely because her slow, dull spirit was
deeply attached to his wife. For the first eight years of the reign the
Whigs were in the ascendancy.

The dynastic issue was growing more acute. By the Act of Settle-
ment of 1701 the English crown had been fixed upon Anne for her
lifetime and then upon the line of James Ts daughter and the Elec-
tor Palatine: Sophia, the dowager Electress of Hanover, and her
Protestant descendants. James II and his son, pensioners of Louis,
were out of the question at a moment when Britain was on the verge
of war with France, and the Hanoverian claim was recognized as a
matter of expediency.

The Tories could not accept this solution as definitive. The pros-
pect of a petty German princess on the throne, followed by a suc-
cession of German princelings, shocked them even more than the
prospect of Dutch William had shocked their fathers. A true Stuart,
furthermore, was growing to manhood in exile, and as the memory
of James II grew dimmer in their minds the attraction of his son
grew stronger in their hearts. Law was no barrier to such romanti-
cism, for the Act of Settlement could readily be unsettled by an-
other parliament.

The act did not apply to Scotland. Her crown was at the disposi-
tion of her own parliament, which was in no mood to accept dicta-
tion from Westminster. The Scots had acquiesced in the deposition
of James, and had been rewarded at long last with the recognition
of Presbyterianism as the national faith. But William's government
had won acceptance rather than enthusiasm, and distrust of Eng-
land was widespread. As long as the Tories fulminated against dis-
senters, the Kirk remained on guard. The Whigs were equally dan-
gerous to Scottish businessmen, who, ever since the Restoration,
had been turning with avidity to commercial enterprise; trade dis-
putes with England were generating almost as much heat as reli-
gion had done in the days of Charles I, and one act after another of
the Westminster Parliament suggested a design to throttle Scottish
prosperity as Irish had been throttled. But the Scots, unlike the
Irish, were far from helpless.

The opening of Anne's reign brought the last crisis in Anglo-Scot-
tish relations. The Scots expected to gain little from a war directed
by English mercantilists, but it gave them the chance to drive a

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

ereign still had influence in the House of Commons and could de-
termine, within limits, the composition of the ministry. Although
the wings of prerogative had been clipped, the bird was far from
dead.

Anne alone could scarcely have overthrown the Whigs. Their
popularity was waning as the war dragged on. The burden of sup-
porting the allied armies fell particularly on the landowning class;
when a Whig government scratched a squire hard enough with
taxes, it found a Tory. Another factor also jeopardized Whig power.
The rank and file of the clergy were high Anglican and bitter ene-
mies of dissent; they were influential in the countryside, where the
pulpit could affect more votes than the pamphlets of Defoe, Addison,
and Steele. The principle of toleration that was taking root in White-
hall was still alien to the counties, and the world of Sir Roger de
Coverley was quick to respond to the old war-cry of "the church in
danger/* In 1710 the Whig ministry was dismissed, and in the sub-
sequent election the Tories acquired an overwhelming majority.

The Toryism of 1710, unlike that of 1681, was weak at the core;
the sap of ideas had gone out of it. But its immediate tasks were
clear, to crush dissent and end the war, and the government quickly
tackled them. It plugged a loophole by which the Test Act had
been evaded, and it gave the Church of England such a monopoly
of education that dissenters might no longer rear their children in
their faith. The days of the Clarendon Code seemed to be return-
ing. Simultaneously negotiations were opened with France, and
Marlborough was recalled and dismissed. The Queen was then per-
suaded to create twelve Tory peers, who destroyed the Whig ma-
jority in the House of Lords and so broke the last stronghold of the
war party. The purpose was to force through the Treaty of Utrecht,
but the constitutional effect was even more important: the ministry,
backed by the commons and the Crown, forced its will on the Up-
per House. The method was too drastic to be used often, but as a
last resort it was unanswerable. The memory of it sufficed for the
future. Two of Anne's successors, one in the early nineteenth cen-
tury and one in the early twentieth, threatened to pack the lords,
and in both cases the threat was enough to paralyze their veto
power.

The conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht, over the seeming corpse
of the Whig party, marked the apogee of the Tories. An unpopular

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

died that lie would be able to bring in the Elector, willy nilly, as a
Tory puppet. This design required time, but he had only five days
of undisputed authority. Then the Queen died, and "his schemes
collapsed about his ears.

The Whigs saw to it that Elector George was proclaimed king
and summoned at once from Germany. Even before he landed, the
new King replaced the Tory ministers with Whigs, and soon Boling-
broke fled for his lif e to France. There he took service with the pre-
tender, and helped to plan the Jacobite rising that broke out in 1715.
It ignited little more than the Scottish highlands, however, and fiz-
zled out against the apathy of the people at large. The old cause
was lost irretrievably, and the Tories who had flirted with it were
extinguished as a party.

Church and Crown remained, it is true, but the virtue that the
Cavaliers had found in them was gone. The church of Laud and
the Tories became riddled with compromise as soon as the Whigs
regained control of it and restored its concessions to dissent; its
apostolic authority was soon dissipated in a haze of broad-minded-
ness. Anne's crown sat very differently on George's head. The balm
of romance had at long last been washed from the anointed King:
this deputy of the Lord was a cold, uncouth man with ugly mis-
tresses; he reigned by the grace of the oligarchs, and the sight of
him could not evoke from the most ardent royalist more than a sigh
of acceptance.

A prosaic church, and crown were a small price to pay for security.
The great issues of the preceding age had been largely fought out,
and the revolution had been preserved. In the process Great Britain
had been unified and modernized. Her system of government was
the envy of European liberals, and she was ready for an expansion
that 'would make her, within a century, the world's greatest imperial
power. Her heyday was beginning, with tie oligarchy for its driving
force and the Hanoverians for its hallmark.

VI The Whig Ascendancy

THE REIGNS of the first two Georges, from 1714 to 1760, were a
period of relative domestic calm. Changes there were, of many
lands, but the turmoil of the Stuart era had passed. Religious tolera-
tion was established, in practice more broadly than in law, and the

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

might place one of the youngsters with his London bankers, ship
another to Bengal in the service of the East India Company, and ar-
ticle the last as a clerk with the family solicitors. In such ways the
professions and the business world were recruited from the aristoc-
racy.

Land was the basis of political as well as social power. Now that
the House of Commons was all important, the system of electing its
members was the cornerstone of politics. That system had grown up
in the thirteenth century and had never been fundamentally al-
tered. The parliamentary boroughs were still for the most part the
towns prominent in the Middle Ages, and the electoral system in
each was the product of medieval custom. The disparity in appor-
tionment and in voting methods was fantastic. Many towns that had
been thriving in the days of the Plantagenets were now decayed or
even turned into sheepfolds, while what had been insignificant vil-
lages had blossomed into towns; yet the decayed hamlets and the
sheepfolds still sent their representatives, and the new towns did
not. In a few boroughs elections were on a basis tantamount to uni-
versal manhood suffrage; in others only a score or two of the inhab-
itants might vote. The system was chaotic and irrational, but it sur-
vived because it was the oligarchy's means of maintaining itself.

The core of the system was the decayed, or rotten, borough. In
the extreme cases of sheepfold-constituencies, the owner of the land
named to Parliament whomever he wished. In less flagrant cases,
where there was a handful of electors, they voted with decorous
regularity for the candidate proposed by their landlord. Still other
towns were for sale at each election: the voters had their price, of-
ten fixed by long usage, and any one with the wherewithal could
buy a majority. These venal constituencies were openings for the
nouveaux riches who wished to sit in Parliament, but the demand
exceeded the supply; the bulk of the rotten boroughs was held by
the landowners generation after generation, and rarely or never'
came on the open market. The greater the landowner, by and large,
the more boroughs he controlled and the more members of the
House of Commons were his nominees. They generally voted as he
told them to in order to keep their seats, and his word also carried
great weight with the independent members from his locality. He
was usually a peer of the realm sitting in the Upper House; his
younger sons, proteges, and followers sitting in the Lower House

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

royal power of veto had lapsed because it was no longer needed:
the time had gone when the Houses could pass a bill against the
wishes of the Crown and cabinet, and the time had not yet come
when the cabinet dared to press a bill against the wishes of the
Crown. Some elements of the modern system already existed, in
other words, but equally important elements were lacking. Anne's
advisers bore as little resemblance to the cabinet ministers of today
as the rotten borough bore to the present constituency.

The Hanoverian accession increased the cabinet's independence
because George I had little interest in domestic affairs. He had
taken the crown out of a sense of duty to his House, which was dis-
charged by securing a foreign policy favorable to his German prin-
cipality. He and his son after him were neither British like Anne nor
European like William, but only Hanoverian. TL am sick to death of
all this foolish stuff," exclaimed George II in a moment of angry
candor, "and wish with all my heart that the devil may take all your
bishops, and the devil take your ministers, and the devil take the
Parliament, and the devil take the whole island provided I can
get out of it and go to Hanover. 3 *

Such an attitude meant that the cabinet was left to manipulate
the system and to govern the country with only sporadic interfer-
ence from the king. This freedom grew into a constitutional habit
during the regime of a man who, for a generation, towered over all
the other servants of the Crown. Sir Robert Walpole, a cynical, pro-
fane, and hard-drinking squire from Norfolk, rose to leadership of
the cabinet in 1721 and retained his position, with one momentary
lapse, until 1742. He is commonly considered as the first prime min-
ister, not because he was the first to dominate his colleagues (which
Clarendon had done) but because he was the first subject to approx-
imate the role of a chief executive.

Cabinet autonomy and the leadership of a prime minister were
new elements, but they did not yet constitute responsible govern-
ment. A cabinet could not long survive the loss of its majority in the
Commons; neither could it long withstand the antipathy of the king.
The Georges had deputed their power, not abdicated it; Walpole
depended on their favor, and he devoted himself to retaining it with
the assiduity of a Pompadour. He was actually responsible to both
Parliament and the sovereign. As long as the king could make his
will effective, he could not be above and dissociated from the func-

13*

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

and in the cosmopolitanism of Restoration society. But the old aloof-
ness from the European community endured in large measure un-
til the struggle with France that opened in 1688 and ended in 1815.
During that struggle Britain emerged from productive but narrow
parochialism into the limelight of world history.

VII The Second Phase of the Duel with France

THE FIRST two decades of the Hanoverian era gave few indica-
tions of the developments impending. Walpole was no revolution-
ary. He wished to let sleeping dogs He at home and abroad to
keep the peace in order to consolidate the position of the new dy-
nasty and thus of the Whigs. War bred discontent, if only by in-
creasing taxation; it also meant eventual embroilment with France
and French support for the Jacobites. As long as the two great pow-
ers of the west could be kept from each other's throats, minor wars
would burn themselves out without starting a general conflagration.
For years, accordingly, Sir Robert cultivated the good will of Ver-
sailles, with such success that Britain had her longest interim of
peace since the reign of Charles I.

By the 1730*s, however, peace was menaced from a number of
quarters. The principal threats were colonial, commercial, and Eu-
ropean, and the root of them all was Anglo-French rivalry. In North
America trouble was implicit in the geography of the settlements.
As British colonists pushed westward through the Alleghenies and
northward toward the St. Lawrence basin, tie long and thinly held
line of French posts from Cape Breton Island to the Mississippi was
subjected to greater and greater pressure. The French reacted by
trying to strengthen their line, and the resultant disputes were soon
heard across the Atlantic. The bickerings of colonists were unlikely
to generate a conflict in Europe; mercantilist politicians set little
store by territory as such, and the wilds of North America were the
small change of diplomacy. But the quarrels about them ensured
that a major war once begun would engulf the colonies.

British merchants were meeting obstacles to their commercial ex-
pansion, particularly in India, the West Indies, and South America.
Not even Walpole could be indifferent to these obstacles; trade was
still considered a form of national power to be increased at the cost
of other nations. In India native authority was collapsing from the

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

American coast. British merchants were growing steadily angrier at
their exclusion from a rich market, and anger in the countinghouses
spread to a nation bored with years of tranquillity. Spain seemed
weak enough to be an attractive target; few of the warmongers re-
alized that an attack on her would probably involve France and so
lead to another worldwide struggle. The public was in the mood for
a cheap and glorious victory, as the American public was in 1898,
and only the spark of an incident was needed. It came when a mer-
chant captain by the name of Jenkins returned from South America
minus an ear, and claimed that it had been cut off by a Spanish cus-
toms officer. Spanish responsibility for the loss of that ear, as for the
sinking of the Maine, has never been proved, but the ear swept Brit-
ain into war.

For a time Walpole rode the wave of feeling. His foreign policy
had failed, like Neville Chamberlain's just two hundred years later,
but he remained in office to direct a struggle he deplored. It went
badly. The navy was unprepared, as usual after a long period of
peace, and the Spaniards were less contemptible than the jingoes
had supposed. Worse yet, before the war had more than begun the
European storm broke. Charles VI died in 1740; immediately the
new King of Prussia, Frederick II, marched into Silesia, and in
the following spring France, Bavaria, and Spain joined him against
Maria Theresa. Walpole negotiated an alliance with her, but the dis-
aster to her fortunes and the unprofitable Spanish war undermined
his position. In 1742 he resigned, just when the minor conflict that
he had had forced on him was merging with the greater one that he
had dreaded.

Great Britain's role in the War of the Austrian Succession was
thoroughly undistinguished. On land her armies made no great im-
pression, and at sea she failed to exploit her strength. The fleet had
no comprehensive strategy, and the fighting instructions enjoined
upon it almost precluded a tactical triumph. Since the late seven-
teenth century the major maritime states had accepted the idea that
a battle was properly fought only when the two fleets sailed in par-
allel lines, cannonading each other. If they were evenly matched
and engagements rarely occurred unless they were the cannonade
could not be decisive; the guns and gunnery were too inaccurate,
and no admiral could press an advantage while maintaining his line.
After the one large-scale action of the war, the British commander

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The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

to hand, a newcomer to the politics of western Europe: Russia might
be lured by the hope of expanding at Prussia's expense, particularly
as the Empress Elizabeth detested the Prussian King. But the coali-
tion could not accomplish its aims unless France joined it. Aus-
tria therefore abandoned her two-hundred-year-old antagonism and
went wooing at Versailles. Her emissaries played on ihe Pompa-
dour's dislike of Frederick, and dropped hints that French assistance
might be recompensed by concessions in the Austrian Netherlands.
Such an arrangement would be anathema to Britain. But the Austri-
ans had recently lost Silesia despite their British alliance, and bar-
tering the Royal Navy for the French army seemed a profitable
exchange.

Meanwhile the Anglo-French struggle had been informally re-
newed in America, and Britain found herself dangerously isolated in
Europe. When her efforts to revive the Austrian alliance failed, she
negotiated a defensive agreement with Prussia. France, convinced
that Frederick had turned his coat, then yielded to Austria's suit
and joined her against Prussia, while Britain turned from opposing
to supporting Frederick. The Diplomatic Revolution was accom-
plished.

This bewildering shift of alignments was consonant with the two
basic rivalries, Austro-Prussian and Anglo-French, about which Eu-
ropean diplomacy revolved. The reversal of Austrian policy led
Britain to look to Frederick for aid against France, and Britain's
move led in turn to the Austro-French accord. The British were pri-
marily concerned with finding an ally in Europe to distract France
from the conflict overseas, and this they did. The diplomatic alli-
ances of the period, like so many social alliances in the world of
fashion, were manages de convenance contracted in the hope of se-
curity or gain.

VIII Victory Overseas

THE FRENCH design for the new war was based on the lessons of
the previous one. The focus of operations would be the Continent,
and such forces as could be spared would maintain a defensive
against the British overseas. Hanover was assigned the role played
before by the Austrian Netherlands: if the French ended in posses-
sion of the Electorate, the British would be forced to purchase its
return with whatever colonies they might have won. France would

137

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

expansion. This was a modern concept of war, and shocking to some
of his colleagues in the cabinet; they feared the incalculable effects
upon the state system of Europe. Others thought that his insistence
on standing by Prussia was quixotic, now that Britain had gained
so much. His position was weakening.

In 1760 the weight of the Crown was thrown against him.
George II, who had been converted into his staunch admirer, died
and was succeeded by his grandson, George III. The new King was
intent on ridding himself of his great minister and bringing the war
to an end. Pitt, on the contrary, wished to extend it by attacking
Spain, who he knew was about to enter the struggle. The cabinet
refused to support him, and he resigned. Three months later Spain
declared war, only to lose Manila on one side of the globe and Ha-
vana on the other. At the same time the Empress of Russia died
and was succeeded by an unbalanced admirer of Frederick, who
withdrew the Russian armies. French pressure relaxed as peace nego-
tiations with Britain advanced, and Austria had no stomach to con-
tinue the fight alone.

Again, as in the days of Queen Anne, the Whigs who had carried
on the war did not make the peace. Newcastle fell soon after Pitt,
and King George installed as prime minister his favorite, Lord Bute,
backed by a heterogeneous majority often called Tory, though it
bore little resemblance to the party of Bolingbroke. Bute's objective
was his master's, to end the war quickly; in negotiating with France
and Spain he did not insist on every ounce in the pound of flesh to
which Britain's victories entitled her, and the resultant peace was
far from Carthaginian. In concluding it Bute -was largely indiffer-
ent to the interests of Frederick, who was left to make what terms
he could with Austria in the separate Peace of Hubertusburg. He
neither forgot nor forgave Britain's desertion.

Bute's treaty, the Peace of Paris of 1763, had the earmarks of a
compromise. In Europe France gained nothing because she had not
kept possession of Hanover, and so did not have to be bought out. In
America she surrendered Canada and Cape Breton Island to Great
Britain. Spain ceded Florida; the Mississippi was recognized as the
western British boundary, and Louisiana changed hands from
France to Spain. Britain restored the bulk of her other conquests,
French and Spanish, although France returned to India on terms
that condemned her to military impotence. She retained her fishing

141

The Triu?nph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

gone. If Pitt won Canada in Germany, he also helped to lose the
thirteen colonies in Canada.

Britain's triumph planted seeds of trouble for her in Europe and
America, and the rapidity with which those seeds sprouted was also
due indirectly to the same triumph. Peace brought with it a major
financial problem. The war, it was estimated, had cost some ninety
million pounds, most of which had been borrowed; the national
debt had approximately doubled, and the government needed a
commensurate increase in revenue to meet its obligations. Instead
the treaty brought increased expenses to administer and defend the
new territories. Where was the money to come from? Even if the na-
tion could fund the debt, who would bear the increased burden of
imperial administration and defense? To attempt to place it on the
shoulders of the British taxpayer would be not only unfair but un-
wise. No cabinet would be likely to survive the attempt, and few
politicians in any period welcome the thought of political suicide.

The obvious method was to lay a share of the burden on the col-
onies, so that they would at least begin to pay for themselves. That
course might well mean trouble in America. But any other expe-
dient was sure to mean trouble in Great Britain. The King's advis-
ers knew little about American opinion and a great deal about Brit-
ish; they understandably chose the risk of provoking the one as
against the certainty of provoking the other. Their decision to in-
crease colonial revenues, in order to solve a problem created by
Britain's victory, precipitated her greatest imperial disaster.

Thus the signature of the Peace of Paris was one of the pivotal
moments in British history. The treaty itself was superficially a com-
promise; actually it recognized Britain's new position as the predom-
inant European power in the world beyond Europe. The oligarchy
that had projected her into that position stood triumphant, not only
over France but even over the disturbing grandeur of Pitt; his
poetry of empire had been largely rewritten in mercantilist prose.
The Paris settlement suggested that the future lay open to prosaic
competence, which was the genius of the oligarchs.

In fact, however, the problems hanging over Britain required a
quite different quality. They could be approached and grappled
with prosaically, but they could be solved only by intuition, by a
political sixth sense keen enough to feel its way through the unf a-

143

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

case in point was France, where an arbitrary and inelastic regime
was exposed to the ruthlessness of the Gallic mind. But every gov-
ernment in western Europe, the British included, was exposed to a
greater or less degree to the same kind of ruthlessness.

The force behind such criticism was not exhausted by attacking
religious, political, and social tradition. Inevitably rationalists
turned their attention to man*s relationship with his physical en-
vironment. Scientific curiosity had been growing by leaps and
bounds since the sixteenth century, and the discoveries of science
had been increasingly utilized by kings and capitalists. But the run
of mankind had been little affected. Peasants still bred their stock
and ploughed their fields as they had in the Middle Ages, and man-
ufacturers had not yet dreamed of the potentialities in power and
mechanical tools. Here, in the basic economy of Europe, tradition
still reigned supreme. The philosophers gave it little notice, but the
spirit that moved Voltaire to fulminate against the Bourbon abso-
lutism moved lesser men to question the ways of raising calves and
cabbages and to speculate on the uses of steam. These humble arti-
sans of the enlightenment were merely applying their reason to the
humdrum problems of farm and shop, but in the process they were
beginning to transform the physical framework of society.

An observer in Great Britain would have seen spectacular signs of
this transformation before the century was out, but little sign of a
commensurate change in ways of thought or institutions. In reli-
gion, where the churches of fashion were weakened by a philo-
sophic anemia, a dynamic revival was at work outside their pale. In
political theory the oustanding figure was Edmund Burke, who
scorned the single standard of reason and glorified the values of
tradition. The constitution evolved during the period, but by force
of circumstance and human obstinacy rather than by that of doc-
trinaire ideas. The age-old British love of the workable, as opposed
to the logical, seemed to be proof against the leaven of rationalism.

But under the surface the leaven was at work. Reformers were
demanding that the structure of domestic and imperial government
should be revised in the light of common sense. Reform at home was
virtually impossible; not until the self-interest of the oligarchy had
been shaken, first by a revival of royal influence and then by the
demands of a new plutocracy, did logic have a hearing. Reform in
the empire was another matter. There the unreason of the tradi-

147

The Defensive Agamst Revolution^ 1763-1815

position that the colonists' political rights were as dependent upon
the sovereignty of Westminster as were their economic rights.

Logic had behind it the impetus of necessity. The financial crisis
arising from the Peace of Paris could not be solved by imperial
laissez faire. In the light of that crisis the old colonial system was
revealed in its absurdity, as a jumble of regulations and restrictions
that were honored in the breach and did not yield the necessary
profit. The King's ministers were as anxious to end this anomaly for
the sake of revenue as the reformers were for the sake of common
sense. "If any of the provinces of the British empire cannot be made
to contribute towards the support of the whole empire/* wrote
Adam Smith, **it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself
from the expense of defending those provinces . . . and endeavor
to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity
of her circumstances." * Ministers shared Smith's premises > but they
refused to face his conclusion. Politics is a road of innumerable
bridges, and no politician dares cross too many in advance. The
politicians in Whitehall were content with deciding that America
should in fairness pay for herself, and with elaborating a plan to
make her do so; they scarcely considered what they would do if the
plan produced resistance. That question had no attractive answer.

The initial plan was sensible. The colonial legislatures could not
be asked to increase direct property taxes, which they controlled,
because they had already demonstrated that they would neither co-
operate to apportion the burden among themselves nor contribute
their fair shares individually; if the initiative were left to them, the
loyal colonies would pay while the disaffected went scot free, and
the sum raised would be grossly inadequate. The alternative, which
was the basis of the program adopted, was taxation levied by au-
thority of tie British Parliament in the form of imposts on American
commerce and business. The acts of trade were to be increased in
scope, and the navy was to be used to suppress illicit trade and
strengthen the machinery of collection. The resultant revenue, it
was hoped, would be sufficient to pay the cost of colonial defense
and the salaries of royal officials in America. Thus the empire would
be put upon a sound financial basis.

The implementing of this scheme provoked colonial opposition on

The conclusion of The Wealth of Nations.

149

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

tant as it was to Britain's future, was inadmissible to the British of
the time.

The assertion of the colonial claim was particularly dangerous be-
cause it coincided with quarrels at home that were weakening the
government. That weakness was another imponderable that the re-
formers of empire left out of account. The new King was devel-
oping his attempt at rule by personal influence, and this apparently
extraneous experiment was jeopardizing whatever chance of suc-
cess the imperial experiment might have had. The two, unrelated
in their origins, occurred simultaneously within the core of govern-
ment, and were soon interdependent. The King's effort to rule in
England was an indirect but major cause of revolution in New Eng-
land, and the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown forced the sur-
render of his master to the oligarchs at home. The great colonial re-
volt is therefore incomprehensible without an understanding of the
concomitant civil war in British politics.

II The Emergence of the King

GEORGE Ill's experiment, although it was scarcely the fruit of ra-
tionalism, was made possible by the irrationality of the existing sys-
tem. The oligarchs had paid a price for their monopoly of power:
the great bulk of citizens had no stake in the system and regarded
it except in moments of national crisis with a disinterest bor-
dering on apathy. The rural masses had rights guaranteed them by
law, but were largely at the mercy of magistrates, landlords, and
the gentry of the House of Commons. Office in the church, the
armed services, and the national government was as open to venal-
ity and influence as to talent. The theory of representation was more
highly developed than in any other major state, but Parliament in
practice was a fashionable club. The Crown, it seemed, retained
power on the tacit condition that the king should not exercise it.
Such paradoxes were an invitation to change, and not only to the
rationalist; they were equally inviting to the shrewd politician who
sat on the throne. He sensed that the Whigs had behind them nei-
ther logic nor loyalty.

Their experience had not prepared them to cope with George III.
His accession in 1760 came just a hundred years after that of the

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

civil service were freed from dependence on favor, and above all if
the rotten boroughs were eliminated and the House of Commons
made truly representative of the propertied classes, the King would
be defeated. So, in all likelihood, would the Whigs. The means
whereby they had maintained their ascendancy for generations were
now being used against them; if they destroyed the means, would
they not also destroy their ascendancy? Their basic choice was be-
tween submitting to the King and risking suicide.

Most of them refused to accept either surrender or reform. In-
stead they struggled to outplay the King at the old, familiar game;
but the cards were stacked against them. They became more des-
perate and more rancorous as royal influence grew, and the Ameri-
can issue became their weapon. They assailed the idea of taxation,
now claiming that Parliament lacked the power to tax without con-
sent, now admitting the power but deploring its exercise. While
they were inspired to some extent by the old Whig dislike of gov-
ernmental trespass on the individual, they were also opportunists.
The King had not initiated the scheme of imperial reform, but it
was being advanced by successive ministries for which he was held
in large measure responsible. Inevitably it became linked with his
domestic schemes, until opponents of one were opponents of the
other. Even in the decade of the 1760's the lines were being drawn
for a civil war on two fronts.

During that decade neither George nor his opponents had a secure
majority. The result was a rapid succession of compromise minis-
tries; none was amenable enough to please the King or strong
enough to survive his displeasure. In such an atmosphere consistent
policy was almost out of the question: a minister could not carry
out a long-range plan when he had just assumed office and was
about to resign it. The imperial problem was therefore handled in
the worst possible way, inconsistently, and under that handling it
began to grow from an argument into a war.

The blame does not rest solely on George. The opposition had no
plan of its own, but its criticisms made up in cogency and eloquence
for what they lacked in creativeness. The principal critic was the
greatest figure in British politics, William Pitt, by then Lord Chat-
ham; he and his f ollowers harried a succession of cabinets and con-
tributed their share to the fatal oscillation of policy. In the words of
Junius, the mysterious satirist of the period, "their declarations gave

153

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

eign and a venal parliament on one side, from the real sentiments
of the English people on the other."

The real sentiments of the English people were far from clear.
The legality of North's program was widely questioned, and the
fear of disrupting the empire increased as colonial resistance
mounted. But the only means of staving off disaster was to change
the government, and by now the King was so firmly entrenched that
change would be revolution. A few extremists threatened to go the
whole way. But the nation at large, although it had lost faith in the
close and corrupt corporation of government, was apathetic rather
than rebellious, and regarded the quarrel with America as the
King's affair. Official policy, in consequence, was neither restrained
by public opinion while war was germinating, nor strongly sup-
ported by it when war began.

For several years North tried conciliation. Obnoxious taxes -were
removed, and even the notorious duties on tea which lowered its
price in America were intended as a gesture of good will. But the
quarrel had gone too deep to be healed by gestures. The jurisdic-
tion of the mother country was not an issue that could be compro-
mised. On one side of it stood the King, determined with all the ob-
stinacy of his nature that his subjects across the Atlantic should
accept his constitutional authority, and backed in this determination
by a majority of Parliament. On the other side stood a group of in-
transigent Americans, particularly in Massachusetts, who were by
now equally determined to force matters to a head; they were mas-
ters of propaganda, political maneuvers, and calculated rioting, and
they made the most of every British blunder. Those blunders were
frequent, partly because the King's ministers still had only a vague
knowledge of American opinion, partly because their instinctive re-
action to defiance was the strong line. To North, Samuel Adams and
his ilk were demagogues bent on subverting law and reason; to Ad-
ams, North and his master were bent on subverting liberty.

These views were irreconcilable, and the men who held them also
held the balance between peace and war. North's cheapened tea
was dumped into Boston harbor, and the resultant punishment of
Massachusetts raised a tumult throughout the colonies. Violence
bred coercion, which bred further violence; as the vicious cycle
gained momentum, the last chance of settlement vanished. North

155

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

The reasons behind the policy were less military than political
and diplomatic. On the political side, the parliamentary opposition
now embraced some of the finest minds of the period Edmund
Burke, the philosopher of conciliation; the stormy young liberal,
Charles Fox; and behind them the towering figure of Lord Chat-
ham. The Earl was afflicted by gout and arrogance "lion-sick, sick
of proud heart" but he was still the most respected man in Brit-
ain. Although he had no solution to offer, he saw clearly what was at
stake. "America, if she falls,'* he declared, "will fall like the strong
man; she will embrace the pillars of the state and pull down the
constitution along with her.** His followers could not have risen to
such metaphor, but they agreed on the idea behind it, that the
whole future of British government hinged on the outcome of the
rebellion. They were tacit allies of the Americans, ready to exploit
a British defeat as a victory for their cause. The government's mili-
tary planning 'was circumscribed accordingly; disasters in America,
such as those with which the previous war had begun, might have
devastating repercussions in Westminster.

On the diplomatic side, Britain was handicapped by her isola-
tion. She had no friend in Europe, and France and Spain were her
inveterate enemies; her colonial involvement was their opportunity
to join in an assault on her empire. They were loath, it is true, to
traffic with rebellion for fear that the virus might spread to their
own empires, but that danger was remote. The chance of gain was
immediate and grew brighter with time. The longer the Americans
held out, the better risk they became. As soon as their cause proved
itself viable, it would be a tremendous temptation despite its repub-
lican odor.

These two factors, the domestic opposition and the threat from
Europe, placed the government in a strategic dilemma at the outset.
They pointed to a single conclusion: the rebellion must be settled
promptly, to safeguard the King's position at home and preclude
foreign intervention. But settled how? On this essential question the
two factors suggested conflicting answers. The destruction of the
American army would obviously end the war, and hence the foreign
menace, in the shortest possible time. Yet it would entail grave do-
mestic problems. Government had set out to raise money in the col-
onies, and instead had raised the devil of revolt; to provide enough
soldiers to put down the devil would be enormously expensive, and

157

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

Saratoga also ended Britain's one real opportunity to win the war.
The surrender proved to Versailles that the rebellion was a sound
risk. The Americans had survived strangulation by the Royal Navy
and had contained and defeated a British invasion; their defensive
power was surprisingly great, and their commander had learned
how to use it. Washington was no Marlborough in the field, but as a
war leader he had many of the great Duke's qualities the inde-
fatigable patience, the farsightedness, the elasticity, and above all
the power to infuse bickering, self-important men with his own sin-
gleness of purpose. That purpose was transforming the revolutionary
party into the beginnings of a state, and the French government ob-
served the process with detached interest.

The independence of the United States would be indirectly prof-
itable to France as a blow to British power. But direct profit de-
pended on keeping the war going, not bringing it to a close. It was
an extremely useful sideshow, which absorbed a larger proportion
of British strength than of French. Sound strategy dictated sending
just enough force to prevent an American defeat, while France re-
venged herself on Britain by conquests elsewhere. When these were
secured, the time would be ripe for a general settlement. The
United States was for France essentially a means of distracting the
enemy, as Prussia had been for Pitt or the Netherlands for Elizabeth.

In the spring of 1778 French intervention extended a civil war on
the Atlantic seaboard into a world war fought from the Indian
Ocean to the Caribbean. From the military viewpoint Britain would
have been well advised to end the American war at once. She could
scarcely hope to win it until she had vanquished France, which she
had never yet done single-handed, and liquidating it would give her
the force to defend the rest of the empire. But political considera-
tions outweighed military; even leaders of the opposition bridled
at the thought of recognizing the independence of the United States,
and the King would not consider it. At the same time he saw the
danger in the alternative course. When France intervened and
Spain was expected to follow suit, he pointed out that '"if we are to
be carrying on a land war against the rebels and against those two
powers, it must be feeble in all parts and consequently unsuccess-
ful." That is exactly what it was for the next five years.

At the outset Britain abandoned the grand strategy of her previ-
ous war with France. Because the navy did not seriously attempt a

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The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

lowed it. When the two squadrons met off the Chesapeake, the
British were badly outnumbered; after one of the dullest and most
important engagements of modern history they retreated to New
York. Cornwallis, already surrounded by land, was now cut off from
help by sea. Six weeks later he surrendered, the victim of an intri-
cate and brilliant combined operation. The British thereafter had
nothing left in North America to plan for or fight with, and the war
in that theater was finished.

Yorktown was more than an isolated disaster or the concluding
episode of a campaign. It was the culmination of six and a half years
of military improvisation by British ministers and field commanders.
They failed to conquer the colonies when the chance was best, dur-
ing the first three years, largely because they did not marshal the
requisite force but relied on negotiations backed by economical and
indolent campaigning. They lost the colonies largely because they
embarked on an offensive too great for their resources.

These are only partial explanations. Behind the military realities
lay the political, which were the true determinants of strategy. If
Yorktown was the doom of King George's experiment, the experi-
ment was what led to Yorktown. By 1775 Britain had been divided
against herself, and for the next six years this division cut down her
available strength and impaired her effective use of what she had;
the rancor of domestic politics spread to the camp and the quarter-
deck. Generals and admirals made errors aplenty, but their basic
handicap was that of the home front, a numbing of the will.

IV The Repercussions of Defeat

THK news from Virginia was the deathblow to North's administra-
tion; the King was at last constrained to let him resign. Rule by in-
fluence was virtually ended, and other hands took up the task of re-
pairing the havoc it had wrought. The immediate necessity was
peace, and in 1783 negotiations culminated in the Treaty of Ver-
sailles. Britain had lost the American war, and had to concede the
independence of the United States. But her losses elsewhere had
been minor, and so were her concessions to the Bourbon powers. To
Spain she ceded Minorca and Florida, but not Gibraltar, and to
France only two minor West-Indian islands and a station on the
coast of Africa. Except for Minorca these were trifling changes.

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The Defensive Against Revolution., 1763-1815

at rare moments, molded developments on both sides of the Atlantic.
It enabled the British to reconcile themselves to the loss of their
most advanced colonies, and it enabled the United States to grow
to nationhood within the orbit of British power.

The British reconciled themselves because defeat began a trans-
formation in their ideas of imperialism. The mercantilist concept
had received a rude shock: the attempt to make the colonies prof-
itable had shattered the empire. Few were as yet ready for Burke's
great vision of colonies bound to the mother country by immaterial
bonds of affection, kinship, and common experience, "ties which,
though light as air, are as strong as links of iron." Equally few were
ready for Adam Smith's pessimistic alternative, that Great Britain
should slough off unprofitable colonies and "accommodate her views
and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances/* Yet the
cash nexus of empire had been assayed by war and found inade-
quate; a new principle was needed. It did not fully mature for an-
other fifty years, but developments of the 1780*s showed signs of a
significant departure from the spirit of mercantilism. The change
can best be seen in the handling of two imperial problems, one in
Ireland and one in India.

King George had made his influence felt as much in Dublin as in
London. He had used his control of patronage both to increase his
power in Ireland and to reward his British henchmen. The result of
this and other factors was to alienate even the Dublin oligarchy, and
to stimulate the demand for a legislative independence that would
leave the Crown the only link between Ireland and Britain. This
demand was similar to that which had been advanced in America,
and from the British viewpoint it had the same constitutional draw-
back: the Crown was inseparable from the Westminster Parliament.
But the political setting was wholly different. Ireland was near at
hand, and her oligarchs, even if they acquired legal autonomy,
could not evade the fact that their power depended upon the Brit-
ish connection.

Events in America enormously stimulated the reform movement
in Ireland. After 1776 it came under the leadership of Henry Grat-
tan, a statesman who combined the Irish gift for oratory with an un-
Irish gift for moderation. His program included not only legislative
independence, but the removal of restrictions on Irish commerce
and, most significant of all, on the Catholics. The age-old religious

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

The auguries for the future were unhappy. But for the moment all
was serene. The British had relinquished a fraction of their power
with a forbearance and good will they had not shown in their recent
stand on the American question. Even if they were making a virtue
of necessity, the virtue was novel.

A similar novelty appeared in their attitude toward India. During
the two decades after 1763 the Indian problem had for the first time
come to the forefront of politics, because the premises which had
long underlain British influence in India were crumbling, as they
were in America. The one question, like the other, touched the fun-
damentals of empire, and in the hard light of the American disaster
the premises of Indian government were reappraised and altered.

The old premises were those of business more than of govern-
ment, and they produced a monstrosity. The East India Company,
existing essentially for the profit of its shareholders, acquired politi-
cal influence in spite of its directors. Their hand was forced by their
servants on the spot, who were driven deeper and deeper into the
maze of native politics by their desire to enrich the company and
themselves, and even more by the force of circumstance. The chaos
of eighteenth-century India turned foreign traders into politicians
willy nilly.

The disintegration of native Indian authority and the disarming
of the French produced a power vacuum. The Company was a
power. It had behind it stable revenues and an open line of com-
munications with Britain. It had learned in self-defense to employ
native mercenaries, trained and officered by Europeans; the glitter-
ing hordes of a rajah were no match for this disciplined force of
sepoys, and the temptation to use it grew with the growth of native
anarchy. At first the Company troops were assigned to protect a
well-disposed prince on condition that he pay for them. This tech-
nique culminated in Bengal of the 1760's, where a native puppet
had the hopeless task of governing the province while collecting its
revenues and Aiming them over to the Company. They were such a
rich harvest that the shareholders demanded higher dividends and
the government appropriated 400,000 a year. Such inroads de-
prived the Company of most of its working capital, and Bengal fell
into administrative squalor.

This intolerable situation produced the regulating act of 1773, the
first direct governmental interference in Company affairs. The di-

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The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

and Sheridan saw in him the personification of the ruthlessness
and rapacity that had stained the British record in India for the past
generation. They hounded him with all the wiles of the prosecutor,
and their oratory gave to even the flimsiest charges the sound of
thunder from Olympus. After seven years he was acquitted on all
counts, and retired to live on a pension from the company he had
saved.

In one sense his impeachment was tragedy spiced with vindictive-
ness, but in a deeper sense it was the sign of a new spirit. Thought-
ful Englishmen had long been disturbed by the rumors coming out
of India and by the wealth of the returned Company servants who
lorded it as "nabobs'* at home. The government, instead of limiting
the game of exploitation, had joined in it as earnestly as the share-
holders, until the scandal lay heavy on the public conscience. The
English people, Voltaire remarked, were as jealous of the liberties of
others as they -were of their own. When they themselves became the
oppressors, their sense of guilt demanded a sacrifice. Hastings -was
the victim, selected unfairly and prosecuted intemperately. He was
not accountable for the system; but its iniquity was real, and
through Trim it was attacked.

The impeachment demonstrated a fundamental principle: the
Company's governmental functions were delegated to it by the
state, to which the Company agents were responsible. This princi-
ple implied another: the state itself must be responsible for the peo-
ple of India; otherwise the irresponsibility of the trader would
merely be replaced by that of the bureaucrat. The Crown could jus-
tify its intrusion into Indian government, in the last analysis, only on
the ground that it was acting for the benefit of the governed. This
justification is implicit in the peroration with which Burke closed his
indictment of Hastings.

I impeach him in the name of all the commons of Great Britain, whose
national character he has dishonored. I impeach him in the name of the
people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, . . .
whose country he has laid waste and desolate. I impeach him in the name
and by the virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.

Here was a new ingredient in British imperialism. If the Seven
Years' War introduced a romantic emphasis on power, foreign to the
mercantilist spirit, the trial of Hastings revealed a more subtle form
of romanticism the idea that power justifies itself in the welfare of

167

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

the prestige and the solid majority needed to force the King into re-
tirement. But he had a great name behind him, a will and pride. to
match his father's, and an unbelievably precocious skill in handling
the House; gradually he strengthened his grip on power. He was no
inveterate enemy o prerogative, like Fox, but he was equally far
from being a North. He rode his cabinet on a light rein and handled
his sovereign with a tactful firmness that gave him no chance to im-
pose his will. George's obstinacy, now aggravated by a recurrent
mental disease, -was always difficult, and in later years produced one
major clash. But in general the King allowed himself to be led
slowly out of politics and so into an unwonted popularity. When
he no longer sought to rule he became at last what he had set out
to be, the father of his people, and the long war made him the focus
of the nation's loyalty. The Crown, in short, was beginning to as-
sume its modern dualism, a character that is intensely personal from
the viewpoint of popular emotion and thoroughly impersonal from
the viewpoint of government.

The result was true ministerial responsibility, although still in the
narrow terms of the period. Pitt was no longer, like his predeces-
sors, accountable in fact to both the sovereign and the House of
Commons; the House alone was the center of authority. It was still,
however, largely a closed world, immune to popular pressure except
at moments of great excitement, and neither Pitt nor the rank and
file of the Whigs had any desire to change the situation. They acqui-
esced in the small reforms needed to exclude direct royal influence,
but they opposed any sweeping reform lest it sweep away their own
position.

The demand for such reform was appearing in many quarters.
The existing system, whether dominated by the Crown or the mag-
nates, was a government isolated from the governed. It had long
justified itself to the nation by success, but now the American disas-
ter had shaken its prestige beyond the power of the borough-mon-
gers to repair. Although they took back their power from the King
and used it effectively, it was ceasing to be accepted as part of an
immutable social order. Radical and even liberal Whigs, jolted by
the loss of the colonies and touched by new ideas, were beginning
to demand a revision of the system, and the amorphous Whiggism
of the previous generation was cohering into two groups, the pro-
ponents of a new order and the defenders of the old. The former

169

The Defensive Agatnst Revolution, 1763-1815

long before it set its mark on Parliament. It eventually remade Brit-
ain's character and her position in the world, and then went on to
remake the world itself. Even in the 1790*s, in its early stages, it was
becoming a central theme of British history.

For centuries Great Britain had been amassing the wherewithal
for an explosion of material progress. The growth of her commerce,
stimulated by the production of wool for export and by the resultant
enclosure movement, had been assisted by political accident the
timely decay of Spanish power, the absorption of the Dutch and
then of the French into the maelstrom of Continental wars. Britain
had capitalized, in the literal sense, on her double blessing of pas-
tures and insularity. The result was that profits, reinvested to create
further profits, led at length to a surplus of wealth that sought new
fields for investment.

The obvious field was the land of England. Sheepf olds could not
be expanded indefinitely, if only because the market for raw wool
was finite; but the enclosure movement had broken the shackles of
the manorial system and pointed the way to another form of rural
capitalism, the exploitation of the arable. The growing population
had heightened the demand for food, and the landed interest had
the money and power to satisfy the demand. In the eighteenth cen-
tury an enormous resurgence of enclosure, financed by the oligarchy
and legalized by its parliamentary instrument, increased the yield
and the profit of farming. Simultaneously the landlords began to im-
prove the methods of husbandry, from turnip-raising to cattle-breed-
ing; the stature of vegetables and animals, if not of man, could be
increased by taking thought, and in the process English agriculture
was transformed. Its methods had hitherto been medieval; now it
became a competitive, scientific, and lucrative form of business.

The agrarian changes were felt throughout the country. For the
moment they strengthened the position of the landed interest, and
so of the political conservatives, by the flow of wealth from the soil.
But other results were more significant. Only a fraction of the new
capital could profitably be reinvested in land, and the remainder
was a force for expansion elsewhere. Because husbandry required
fewer workers than before, those pushed off the land perforce
sought other employment. The food supply outstripped the needs of
the rural population. Thus agricultural development created three
of the prerequisites for the factory system. Without a surplus of

171

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

was by then outstripping the supply of raw material, and that short-
age was solved in America by the cotton gin. So the process went, in
an intricate web of cause and effect spreading farther and farther
from its center.

The immediate effects were on other British industries. As water
power, with its seasonal fluctuations, gradually gave place to steam,
the need for iron to make machines and coal to run the steam en-
gine transformed the techniques of mining; the vast subterranean
wealth of the island began to be exploited At the same time trans-
portation was being revolutionized, primarily to solve the problem
of weight. Coal, iron ore, machinery, and even food and textiles in
bulk were too heavy for the mud roads of the period. A partial solu-
tion was provided by canals and turnpikes, built with private capi-
tal and operated for profit, and by the work of such men as Telford
and McAdam in modernizing the king's highway. But these im-
provements did not fill the need, which grew for another generation
until it produced the railroad age.

The effects of industrialization were also felt in Britain's social
structure. The dramatic developments there, as in transportation,
did not come until after the Napoleonic wars, but even by the 178Cfs
the hallmark of a new order was being stamped upon the north of
England. Small villages were mushrooming into factory towns, and
whole districts that had been dozing since the Middle Ages were
waking to the noise of forges and gears. A vast shift of population
was beginning, caused by forces beyond human control. The new
machines were cumbersome, expensive, and therefore concentrated;
the areas of concentration were determined by economic factors
such as the availability of power and raw materials. Because food
for the workers was no longer the predominant factor, the center
of English agriculture was not the center of the new industry. The
food-producing counties, the traditional heart of the nation, were in
the south; the foci of manufactures and mining were in the wilds
of the north, in the Midlands, and in southern Wales. This change in
the whole structure of population created or accentuated grave so-
cial problems.

One was a new form of poverty. As the small-scale rural tenants
were forced off their land, they became either migrant farm labor-
ers or industrial workers, and in both cases their existence was pre-
carious. Agriculture and industry were in transition. Even their

173

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

posed the tariff barriers that were an integral part of the system, and
their eventual goal was free trade.

A minor episode at the beginning of Pitt's administration fore-
shadowed the struggle to come. The Prime Minister, like Walpole
before him, was anxious to heal the old quarrel with France, and his
method was in effect a reciprocal trade treaty for the lowering of tar-
iffs. The leaders of the conservative and long-established industries,
nurtured on protection, organized themselves to combat this move
toward economic liberalism, and were seconded by intransigent pa-
triots who opposed any reconciliation with the Bourbons. The lead-
ers of the new industries, on the contrary, considered the treaty a
step toward free trade and gave it their vociferous support. They
and Pitt carried the day. The signing of the treaty in 1786 was cele-
brated by a jingle that breathes, for all its poetic demerits, the spirit
of the nineteenth-century free-trader:

May kingdom 'gainst kingdom no more be at spite;
For both 'twere much better to trade than to fight;
And whilst mutual friendship and harmony reign,
Our buttons we*U barter for pipes of champagne. 3

Pitt's treaty, like most of his other peacetime policies, was soon
lost in the storm of war. But the economic interests that had sup-
ported him grew steadily stronger, and as the plutocrats of mill and
mine and furnace went on developing their program it gradually
turned them into politicians. They could not implement it without
far more political influence than they had; their bailiwicks, the new
industrial areas, had been insignificant when the system of parlia-
mentary representation had taken form in the Middle Ages, and were
still grossly under-represented. In the decades to come, therefore,
the industrialists turned from their economic aims to the prerequi-
site of parliamentary reapportionment, and they eventually became
the driving force behind the reform movement.

Great Britain, in summary, was in the grip of revolution. The ef-
fects were being felt in society as much as in technology, and even
in politics the need for change was widely admitted. The question
of the degree and speed of reform was beginning to divide the oli-
garchy again into parties. The Tories were circumspect and slow,

Quoted by Witt Bowden: "The English Manufacturers and the Commer-
cial Treaty of 1786 with France," American Historical Review, XXV (Oct.,
1919), 25.

175

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

for reconstructing it; the revolutionaries grappled confidently with
the task of applying the formulae and creating Utopia. Their prem-
ise, like that of their American counterparts who had framed the
Declaration of Independence, was that government is the means to
an end, means that may be abolished and remade in whatever way
will best serve the end. This premise was not widely accepted across
the Channel even by liberals, and at the close of 1790 it was assailed
by Britain's outstanding political philosopher. The assault opened
the Anglo-French war of ideas.

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was one
of the great political documents of the century. It not merely pre-
dicted the development of French liberalism into military dictator-
ship; far more important, it presented an ideal of conservatism for
contrast with the revolutionary ideal a profession of faith as elo-
quent as the declarations of the National Assembly, and one that el-
evated the status quo into a cause worth fighting for. The book was
valuable not merely for the moment, nor even for the quarter-
century of war ahead; it became the bible of Toryism.

Burke denied that the state is a mere convenience, to be reshaped
as reason dictates. For him it is an organic unity, composed of hab-
its, prejudices, past history, as much as of law or logic, and in this
living organism the present generation is linked with those that went
before and those that come after. If his concept of the state is ac-
ceptable, as it was to the vast majority in Britain, operating upon
such an organism with the rationalist's knife is constitutional murder.

Burke struck also at the doctrine of natural rights. Every citizen,
he admitted, exercises a degree of direct or indirect influence upon
the state and is guaranteed certain liberties by it. But he contended
that those liberties are an inheritance, enjoyed according to the con-
ditions of the moment and only as the counterpart of duties; and
that in the exercise of liberties and the performance of duties the
citizen has a moral obligation to "the one great maker, author, and
founder of society.** This obligation is kept before him by the church,
which is the moral force in government and without which govern-
ment is meaningless. Burke therefore indicted the French revolu-
tionaries as much for their treatment of the church as for their treat-
ment of the monarchy.

His major indictment, however, was of revolution as a method.
He insisted on the need of reform in any society, and was fully

177

The Defensive Against 'Revolution^ 1763-1815

of the Walpole era, three remarkable men had gone to war against
the spirit of rationalism in religion. All three were ministers of the
Church of England John Wesley, the prophet and organizer of
Methodism; his gentler and more conservative brother Charles, the
poet of the movement; and George Whitefield, as powerful a revival-
ist as the English-speaking peoples have ever produced. Those three
and their followers went into the highways and byways of the
British Isles and America, preaching a new faith to all who cared to
hear and to many who at first did not. Bar-flies, sailors at the
docks, mill-hands, colliers, were the ^congregations" of the early
Methodists. The movement spread like wildfire, and soon Whitefield
was addressing crowds of ten and twenty thousand. Within a gen-
eration the people at large were being stirred with an enthusiasm
unseen since the days of the preaching friars.

Orthodox religion, whether Anglican or dissenting, had made lit-
tle impression on the bulk of the people. Pastoral care had been
largely confined to the world of Sunday church-goers, and even
John Wesley felt at the start that saving a soul was almost sinful
except in church. Most clergymen were less concerned with salva-
tion than with teaching a reasonable morality, in "which the disturb-
ing elements of the gospel -were judiciously subordinated. This creed
appealed to the minds of the educated, not to the hearts of the illit-
erate and hungry, and religion was becoming identified with re-
spectability.

The Methodists were spiritual revolutionaries. Their creed, unlike
that of the Jacobins, derived from nonrational premises; instead of
man's goodness and perfectibility they talked of sin, hell-fire, and a
heaven achieved solely through grace. They were often anti-intellec-
tual and even grossly superstitious, and their excesses were almost
as shocking to contemporaries as those of the Jacobins; what was
hailed by the devout as the workings of grace seemed to the scep-
tics to be mania. Worse yet, the new evangelists preached a democ-
racy of faith that shocked the established order. They were endeav-
oring, complained an irate duchess, "to level all ranks and do away
with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart
as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth.** *

The Church of England tried to exclude these disturbers of its

4 Quoted by William E, H. Lecky: The History of England in the Eight-
eenth Century (8 vols.; New York; 1888-91), II, 671.

179

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

the revolution he watched its development without undue alarm,
and he hoped until the last minute to avoid a struggle with it.

But war was inherent in the character of the revolution. The very
universality of its ideas challenged every other regime in Europe,
and the French pressed the challenge. In the spring of 1792 they
opened hostilities against Austria and Prussia; soon afterward they
imprisoned the King, turned back an allied invasion, and over-
ran the Austrian Netherlands, Savoy, and western Germany. As the
revolution became European, Great Britain could not long remain
aloof. The balance of power was being upset, and the old enemy
was again ensconced in the Low Countries, hungrily eyeing the
riches of Holland to the north. In Paris the rising tide of radicalism
engulfed the King, who was guillotined in January 1793. The British
public had had almost a century and a half in which to forget the ex-
cesses of revolution, and it was simultaneously outraged by the de-
pravity and alarmed by the military gains of the French. In this at-
mosphere diplomatic relations deteriorated rapidly, until within a
few weeks of the King's execution the French Republic declared
war.

Pitt hated war on principle, and both psychologically and mili-
tarily he was unprepared for it. As a strategist he lacked the broad
vision and intuitive focus on essentials that had made his father
great. As an administrator he was handicapped by a decade of
peacetime success; he had acquired habits of mind that were detri-
mental, and interests that were irrelevant, to the effective conduct
of war. His bent was for finance, and his foreign policy had been
that of an intelligent financier working within the boundaries of a
known international order. When the order crumbled, he continued
to be guided by tradition. French aggrandizement was familiar, and
he met it with the familiar technique of a coalition. When his first
coalition collapsed, he patiently constructed another and then an-
other, only to have them destroyed in turn. In his last years he be-
came a heroic figure, the personification of British tenacity; but he
was never the soul of British power as his father had been.

At the opening of the war that power was at low ebb. The Prime
Minister had put government on its feet financially at the cost of the
armed services; as late as 1792 he had reduced the size of the army
and cut that of the navy almost in half. The methods of recruitment
were slipshod and inadequate, and were never greatly improved

181

The Defensive Agamst Revolution, 1763-1815

squadrons had been driven from the Mediterranean in the previous
year, without a shot fired, by the forced conversion of Spain to the
enemy cause, and during the winter two French expeditions had
reached the British Isles, one in Ireland and one in southern Wales.
Both had failed, but their appearance had showed how far the
Royal Navy was from fulfilling its basic function.

For Britain this year, 1797, was the supreme crisis of the war, al-
most as desperate as the year after June 1940. The French con-
trolled the Spanish and Dutch fleets in addition to their own, and
the crucial question was whether the three could be united in an
overpowering armada. Part of the answer came in February, when
the main Spanish force left the Mediterranean to join the Atlantic
squadrons; it was met and shattered off Cape St. Vincent by an out-
numbered British fleet under Sir John Jervis. The victory was en-
hanced by the brilliant initiative of Jervis's subordinate, Commo-
dore Nelson, and the battle thus brought to the fore the two men
who were to do the most in remaking British naval methods. But its
strategic value was limited, for the French and Dutch fleets were
still to be reckoned with.

The enemy plan was to use those two forces to cover an invasion
of Ireland by two armies, one sailing from Brest and one from the
Texel. In the spring the way was opened wide by mutinies in the
British home fleet. The appalling conditions its sailors had endured
for years suddenly produced naval paralysis. The admiralty and the
flag officers met the peril with firmness and conciliation, and within
two months the mutinies subsided; France lost her one golden
chance to win the war. The home fleet put to sea again, and in Oc-
tober it crushed the Dutch in the hard-fought action of Camper-
down. The Battle of Britain had been won. The French soon revived
their invasion plan, and they nursed it for the next twelve years.
But until the summer of 1940 invasion never again became an im-
mediate threat.

Although Britain had rebuilt her defenses, she was as far as ever
from winning the war. If the enemy could not reach her, neither
could she reach the enemy. The duel between tihe elephant and the
whale had begun, and the whale could only wait until the elephant
came down to or into the water. Fortunately the wait was not long.
The man who was already overshadowing the government of France

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

VII Crisis in Ireland

THE EGYPTIAN expedition had a further significance. It diverted
France from her enemy's true Achilles heel, which for the past two
years had been Ireland. If a fraction of the force sent to the Nile
had landed instead in Bantry Bay, the results -would have been in-
calculable. For in the late spring of 1798 the Irish were again using
Britain's crisis to revenge themselves for their grievances. They
were up in arms for the first time since the days of the Boyne.

Irish patriots had come to regard the legislative independence of
1782 as mere empty legalism. Power remained with the oligarchs of
the so-called Protestant ascendancy; they maintained their position,
to a far greater degree than their fellows in Westminster, by a nar-
row and corrupt parliamentary system, and reform was their night-
mare. At the opening of the war Pitt had endeavored to conciliate
the Irish Catholics by enfranchising them, but he had only partially
overridden the bitter opposition of Dublin. The upshot Bad been an
unfortunate compromise: the Catholics had acquired the right to
vote and to hold most offices but not to sit in Parliament. The Cath-
olic gentry were unimpressed by their new freedom to vote for their
enemies, and Pitt's coercion of those enemies into accepting a de-
tested measure showed that London, not Dublin, still held the reins.
Ireland was not even self-governed, let alone well governed.

The Protestant ascendancy would not reform itself, and Pitt dared
not force it too far for fear of destroying British influence. The Dub-
lin borough-mongers 'were his only allies, -whatever he might think
of them, and the alliance was committed by its nature to resisting
change. The forces of change -were disparate but powerful. The pa-
triots, the Catholics, and the Presbyterians of Ulster agreed in op-
posing the status quo, though in little else. If Ireland had been left
alone, she would presumably have gone the way of Cromwell's Eng-
land or Robespierre's France: discordant factions would have united
to overthrow the existing order, then struggled for power among
themselves. But Ireland had never been left alone, and her embry-
onic revolution was made abortive by forces from outside. One was
obviously British. The other, equally devastating, was French.

The impact of the French Revolution was felt particularly by the
radical Presbyterians of Ulster, who were ripe for new ideas. A Soci-
ety of United Irishmen was founded in Belfast to campaign for reli-

185

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

making the union acceptable in Ireland as an act of equity rather
than of force.

Enormous difficulties stood in the way. The Dublin Parliament
was legally autonomous and had to approve the union to vote it-
self out of existence. The spirit of sacrifice, rare in any legislature,
was nonexistent among the borough-mongers, and Pitt was driven to
a campaign of bribery that was scandalous even by the standards of
the day. Boroughs were bought with money, members with peerages
and sinecures, until at last the dirty work was finished: in 1800 the
Irish legislature dissolved itself, and in place of this age-old symbol
of nationhood Ireland was represented in the parliament of a sup-
posedly united kingdom.

The work was only half done. The keystone of the union, Catholic
emancipation, was slipping out of Pitt's hands. The Dublin clique
was vehemently opposed to emancipation and had the support of
fanatical Protestants in Ulster, of some right-wing British Tories,
and far more important of the King. George was convinced
that he was bound by his coronation oath to maintain Protestantism
inviolate, and he refused point-blank to accept the cabinet's meas-
ure. This was again the old George, and his flash of self-assertion
raised an extremely delicate crisis.

Pitt had the power to defy him. For almost twenty years the prin-
ciple of ministerial rule had been accepted, and the force of prece-
dent was augmented by the Prime Minister's prestige. He had held
office longer than any man since Walpole. He had behind him the
cabinet, the majority in the commons, and the bulk of the proper-
tied class. He was the leader of the country's great effort in a great
cause. For all these reasons he could have forced the constitutional
issue and probably compelled the King to give way.

But to give way how? George, obstinate as ever, might conceiv-
ably abdicate; it was more likely that the strain would be too much
for his mind, which had failed him before, and that he would re-
lapse into insanity. In either case the onus would be on Pitt, and it
was abhorrent to him both as a subject and a politician. The King
had grown into the symbol of Britain, and commanded an affection
so deep that his disappearance might shake the country's morale; he
would be succeeded by his son, as king or as regent, and the acces-
sion of a contemptible rake in the dark days of 1801 would be a na-

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

the American Revolution, was the alienation of the neutral mari-
time states. The principal sufferers were the Baltic countries, and
to them Bonaparte looked for help in breaking the British strangle-
hold. Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia obliged by reviving the Armed
Neutrality of 1780; Russia changed sides and joined them, and her
mercurial Emperor Paul even talked of a Franco-Russian expedi-
tion against India.

Britain's security was re-established by a combination of force and
luck. Nelson attacked the Danish fleet in Copenhagen harbor and
neutralized it after a desperate struggle; much of the armament
and all of the heart promptly went out of the Armed Neutrality. Al-
most simultaneously the Emperor Paul was assassinated and suc-
ceeded by his son Alexander, who withdrew Russia again into neu-
trality. The upshot was that neither France nor Britain could reach
the other. The elephant and the whale had come to a standstill, and
both were winded. Bonaparte needed time to reorganize France
without the pressure of blockade, and mature his plans for future
conquest; the British were war-weary, anxious to reopen their Eu-
ropean markets, and hopeless of re-establishing the balance of
power. Addington, the nonentity who succeeded Pitt, saw the
chance of a settlement now that Bonaparte was bringing order and
almost respectability out of the tumult of revolution. Negotiations
were hastily opened, and in the spring of 1802 a treaty of peace was
concluded at Amiens.

Britain paid dearly for it. She restored virtually all her overseas
conquests from France and the French satellites, and agreed to
evacuate Malta and Minorca, two Mediterranean bases that she had
seized in 1798; in return she obtained only a few minor promises.
France regained her overseas empire without relaxing her hold
upon Europe, a defeat for Britain out of all relation to the success
of her military defensive. The peace also seemed to be a confession
that the cause for which she had fought so consistently was no
longer "worth the effort.

Ilie cause was the deliverance of Europe from the rule of force.
The revolution that had once been pledged to breaking the shackles
of the old regimes was degenerating, to the strains of the Marseil-
laise, into an attempt to bind the Continent in the shackles of
French power. This nationalizing of the great crusade was begin-
ning to wake resentment in peasants as well as aristocrats of the

189

The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

A decade of victories had given the Royal Navy a skill and spirit
that no fighting force has ever surpassed, and many of its flag offi-
cers would have been famous in their own right if Nelson had not
eclipsed them. At the admiralty Jervis, now Lord St. Vincent, had
reformed naval administration in two busy years. The cabinet, fur-
thermore, had learned how to use sea power, and Britain lost no
time in regaining the stranglehold of blockade.

Napoleon Emperor Napoleon, as he became in 1804 realized
that all his designs hinged upon breaking that stranglehold. He
turned first to the obvious method, invasion, for which he spent two
years in marshaling the resources of Europe. He encamped a great
army at Boulogne and collected an armada of small boats to trans-
port it across the Straits of Dover. But he had no desire to step into
a boat until he was confident of stepping out alive on the shore of
Kent; he had to maintain naval control of the straits long enough to
cover the passage of his troops, and he did not attempt to crack this
hard core of his problem until the spring of 1805.

By then Spain had again been forced into alliance with France.
From Brest to Cadiz on the Atlantic coast, from Cartagena to Tou-
lon on the Mediterranean, the Franco-Spanish detachments were
held in port by British blockading squadrons. Close blockade was
impossible, particularly in the Mediterranean, where Nelson had no
suitable base. Napoleon hoped that the Toulon squadron might
sneak out of port, shake off pursuit, join forces -with the Spanish
contingent at Cadiz, and then make for the West Indies; simultane-
ously the main force at Brest might also escape to the westward. He
would then achieve, in the West Indies, his aim of concentrating
his divided squadrons, and they would at once return together to
seize command of the Channel. He of course expected the British to
concentrate in turn, but he hoped to trick them into doing so on
the wrong side of the Atlantic. His strategy was a gigantic ruse, to
persuade them that he was aiming at the Caribbean instead of at
Kent.

His misconception of realities at sea 'was never so evident. He as-
sumed in the Franco-Spanish navy qualities it did not possess. Sea-
manship, for one: years of enforced idleness in port had deprived
officers and men of the sixth sense they needed on a long and dan-
gerous voyage. Timing, for another: the concentration of widely
separated squadrons upon the Caribbean required precise plans

191

The Defensive Agairm Revolution, 1763-1815

power, for all its ups and downs, had been gathering strength since
the sixteenth century strength first to turn back the Spanish, then
to challenge and overwhelm the Dutch, then to vie with the French.
France alone had stood up against that power for more than a cen-
tury, and the climax of her effort came between 1797 and 1805. Dur-
ing those eight years and a half Nelson and his "band of brothers"
harried their enemies from Cape St. Vincent to Camperdown, Co-
penhagen, and the Nile, and demonstrated at sea as Napoleon
was demonstrating on land the strategic effect of the single, crush-
ing battle. Trafalgar was the climactic demonstration. From that Oc-
tober day France ceased to be a major sea power, and for almost a
hundred years to come no other contender challenged Britain's
supremacy.

IX Victory on Land

THE NEWS of Trafalgar reached London in a dark hour. Pitt had
resumed office in the spring of 1804 under pressure of the renewed
struggle, and had devoted himself to building a third coalition. He
had enlisted Austria and Russia, and Napoleon had broken up the
camp at Boulogne to strike with lightning speed, for Vienna. On the
day of Trafalgar he announced the capture of an Austrian army at
Ulm; in November he occupied Vienna; at the beginning of Decem-
ber he shattered the Austro-Russian armies at Austerlitz. Austria
was forced out of the war, the Holy Roman Empire was abolished,
and Germany was remodeled at the will of the new Charlemagne.
Prussia objected too late, and was crushed in a week's campaign.
Russia was defeated in the spring of 1807; her emperor met Napo-
leon on a raft on the river Niemen, where the two concluded the
Peace of Tilsit. ~What is Europe," said Alexander to his compan-
ion, "where is it, if it is not you and I?"

This was a new order with a vengeance. Prussia was eliminated
as a major power, Austria was cowed; France was dominant in Ger-
many and had Italy and Holland for dependencies, Spain for help-
less vassal. On all the Continent only Russia retained her independ-
ence as a power, and at Tilsit Alexander had pledged her not only
to join France, but to help in dragooning the Baltic states and Por-
tugal into the grand alliance. Just when Britain had acquired su-
premacy at sea, she faced a land coalition such as Europe had never
seen.

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The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

ade by a counterblockade of Britain. His choice was dictated by his
character. Patience had never been his long suit, and his temper
was growing more imperious. Now that he had failed to break Brit-
ain's hold by naval force, he turned to the force of economic war-
fare. If his subject peoples could be coerced into living on their own
fat and British trade could be excluded from Europe, he reasoned
Britain's industry would stop, and unemployment and famine would
bring her to her knees. Then the ports would reopen, and the world's
commerce would resume under the aegis of Caesar.

His plan had much to be said for it. The bulk of European soci-
ety was still agrarian, and the pressure of blockade and counter-
blockade would produce a lowered standard of living, hardship and
discontent, rather than large-scale starvation. British economy was
far less self-contained. The demands of war had accelerated the
tempo of the Industrial Revolution and turned the island into a
great workshop. Its food supply, despite agricultural progress, was
no longer adequate for its needs. Because imported food had to be
paid for with manufactures, Britain was vulnerable as never before
to the closing of her major market in Europe. She might or might
not survive its loss.

The implications of Napoleon's plan were enormous. It was called
the Continental System, and it could be systematic only if it were
continental. Europe was not an administrative unit but a congeries
of conquered provinces, dependencies, vassal states, plus France
and her one powerful, undependable ally. All were pledged to a
common policy, but the means to enforce it were another matter; no
amount of pressure on a satellite government could provide effec-
tive customs administration. Ports were numerous and officials lax,
particularly in the two chief peninsulas, the Italian and Iberian, and
the only way to exclude British shipping was to police the coast with
Frenchmen. Universal blockade, in other words, meant universal
empire.

The French had long experimented with embargoes on British
goods, and in 1806-7 Napoleon extended them into a European sys-
tem. He forbade all commerce with the British Isles and ordered
the confiscation of any ship that carried British goods into a port un-
der his control. The British retaliated by closing such ports to every
ship not carrying British goods. Neutral rights were violated by
both sides; the United States was the only remaining neutral of any

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The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

In 1809, after a small British expeditionary force had been chased
into the sea at Corunna, Napoleon's most famous antagonist landed
in Portugal to command another British army. Sir Arthur Wellesley
had made a name for himself in India, where his elder brother had
been governor-general, and his Indian experience now stood him in
good stead. He knew the virtues and limitations of irregular troops,
and the power of improvisation he had developed in the Deccan
was invaluable among the Iberian hills. He was a cold man, as Marl-
borough had been, and methodical; he knew the minutiae of his
business, but never lost himself in them. Defeat left him unruffled;
he could retreat and bide his time, make meticulous calculations,
then strike like a rattlesnake. He cast no such spell on men as Nel-
son had done; his opinion of his troops was low, and they had re'
spect for him rather than enthusiasm. No one except Marlborougb
in the history of the British army deserved respect more.

In 1809 Napoleon was distracted from Spain by another war with
Austria. He crushed her; but the British had a year in which to con-
solidate their position, and Wellesley used the time to good effect.
When the legions poured back across the Pyrenees, he retreated into
Portugal and scorched the earth behind him. The French followed
him down the peninsula between the Tagus and the sea, where Lis-
bon beckoned them with the promise of another Corunna. Then
they came on the lines of Torres Vedras, fortifications stretching
completely across the peninsula. This was Wellesley*s work. The
French could not take the lines by storm, or starve out the sea-based
army behind it; instead they were starving themselves. By the spring
of 1811 the wreck of their force straggled back into Spain, leaving
more than a third of its men dead in central Portugal. Thereafter
the conquerors fought a defensive action, and Wellesley by then
Lord Wellington pushed them back and back. In the autumn of
1813 he forced the Pyrenees; France was invaded for the first time
in twenty years.

During the Peninsular War Britain's blockade was producing
tangible effects elsewhere. In 1812 it touched off hostilities with the
United States. The American government had been in the impos-
sible position of asserting its neutral rights against both the giant
belligerents. Britain was the more obvious transgressor because she
ruled the seas, and her chronic shortage of men led her to search
American ships for deserters and impress American sailors, at sea or

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The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

the Russo-German pact of 1939 went the way of the Munich settle-
ment. In June 1812 Napoleon, with the greatest army Europe had
ever seen, struck eastward from the River Niemen.

He found himself in a vast and incalculable world. The scale of
operations was as different from that in the West as the scale of the
Caucasus is from that of the Tyrol. The farther the Russians re-
treated, the more fully they utilized their advantage of space. The
French pursued recklessly, hoping for the decisive battle that never
materialized. They were led into a larger version of the Portuguese
campaign: they advanced through a wasted countryside, shadowed
by an enemy whom they could not grapple and destroy, until they
met an insurmountable barrier. The Russian equivalent of Torres
Vedras was the winter, which Napoleon had neglected; in his great-
est offensive he had presumed to defy nature. When he recrossed
the Niemen in December of 1812, he left behind him half a million
men. The Grande Armee had vanished.

Almost by spontaneous combustion, Prussia flamed into revolt
As the Russians advanced with their new allies, Austria wavered
and then joined them. In October 1813 the French were over-
whelmed at Leipzig in the Battle of the Nations. After a brilliant but
futile defensive on the road to Paris, Napoleon abdicated in April
1814, and went into exile on Elba. But he had not yet accepted de-
feat. He was still the man who had badgered Villeneuve from his
anchorage nine years before. The collapse of the empire plunged
France into nostalgia and Europe into chaos; the victorious govern-
ments were quarreling with, one another, and in this situation he
saw his opportunity. In March 1815 he returned, and within three
weeks he was master of France. Immediately the four great powers
suspended their squabbles and pledged themselves to his destruc-
tion.

The impending campaign hinged upon speed. It was vital to at-
tack Napoleon before he could tap the vast resources of French man-
power. Attack depended on Great Britain and Prussia; the Austrian
armies were far away and the Russian even farther. A small con-
tingent of British troops happened to be in Belgium; Wellington was
put in command of it, and the government rushed him every avail-
able soldier in Britain. By June he had in the field a polyglot force
of over 80,000 British, Belgian, Dutch, and German and the

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The Defensive Against Revolution, 1763-1815

long story was over that France would never again threaten
single-handed the equilibrium of Europe. The French cycle had
ended, and it was more than half a century before the German cycle
began. For the interim Great Britain had secured the ends toward
which she had been groping since the Glorious Revolution: her
power was world-wide and her security unassailable. Yet in the
process of achieving these ends her old regime had been under-
mined as thoroughly as any on the Continent.

She had paid a high price for survival. Her industrial system was
askew, thanks to the uneven demands of war production, and her
social structure was dislocated; reconversion to the needs of peace
momentarily aggravated her troubles. The result was an intensifying
of the demand for reform. The Tories fought it for a time as dog-
gedly as they had fought the war. But the ruling class as a whole
had not, like its counterparts across the Channel, acquired a terror
of new ideas. Even the Tories began to waver, and before long their
policy showed the influence of liberal ideas. They refused to carry
them through, however, and within fifteen years of Waterloo Well-
ington was commanding a desperate political defensive against re-
form. He lost, and the old oligarchy lost with him. The nation that
had followed its leaders so loyally in defying Napoleon's coercion
refused to follow them in defying the logic of change.

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

themselves a generation earlier, only to have their work undone by
Napoleon. Now they were bent on another partition, and Russia re-
fused to be content with her pre-war share. She had acquired
enormous influence in the counsels of Europe, if only because her
armies had pursued the French from Moscow to Paris, and she was
obviously not going to retire again behind the Niemen; her Polish
demands were a symptom of her new position. Austria and Prussia
agreed in opposing her, but they agreed on little else. Already they
were renewing the duel for the dominance of Germany that Na-
poleon had interrupted. For these reasons the negotiations threat-
ened to explode.

New factors, however, militated against an explosion. The powers
had a common bond in their fear of France: Austria, Prussia, and
Russia had learned at first hand the meaning of French aggression,
and the lesson remained vivid for another half-century; they were
consequently willing to put limits to their greed for the sake of
mutual protection. The resultant spirit of compromise was fragile
at best, and it might not have been strong enough in itself to bring
a peaceful solution. But another factor "was working toward the
same end: Great Britain was vitally interested in a quick settle-
ment, which was prerequisite to re-establishing her European
markets. She was largely aloof from the territorial questions at issue;
it mattered little to her who governed the Poles, and the jealousy
of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern affected her only if it threatened
Hanover. The disposition of the Netherlands touched her more
nearly, but here she had her own means of exerting influence. She
had seized the bulk of Europe's overseas colonies, most of which
she did not wish to retain because she "was already glutted with
territory; their return, however, depended on her satisfaction with
the settlement. Her bargaining position was strong, and her prestige
and power -were at their zenith. The other three great victors, with
whom she was joined in a quadruple alliance, were scrambling for
gains that scarcely concerned her, and her eagerness to end the
scramble made her work for compromise.

A peaceful settlement was achieved, though by a narrow margin,
and it satisfied Britain's desire for stability. The map drawn at
Vienna endured in essence for the next fifty years. Russia obtained
the lion's share of Poland, while Prussia was compensated with the
Rhineland and Westphalia; Austria exchanged the Belgian Nether-

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

unknown, and Austria in particular was committed to destroying
them or being destroyed by them. Her empire contained Germans,
Poles, Czechs, Magyars, Rumanians, southern Slavs, and Italians;
the growth of the nationalist spirit anywhere on her frontiers
threatened to break the empire into its constituent parts. From 1815
to 1918 her government fought the threat first by wars in Italy,
then by a war in Germany, then by a war that began in the Balkans
and engulfed the world.

The theory of nationalism that the French had sowed had another
side. Its emphasis on national solidarity led to an emphasis on na-
tional consent as the basis of government. The conquests of the
revolution had been justified as liberation, and the French had intro-
duced written constitutions to express the consent of the governed;
the European liberals of the Restoration, particularly in Germany
and Italy, inherited this French legacy of nationalism and consti-
tutionalism. But they also inherited through France a legacy from
Britain. Although some of them were Jacobins, many more derived
their ideas from the pre-Jacobin phase of the French Revolution,
the phase of a limited monarchy & Tanglaise, and were as much
Anglophile as Francophile. They wished to see their respective peo-
ples unified under some form of national, parliamentary, and con-
stitutional government, and their thinking was often no more radical
than a Whig's of 1688.

Their arch-enemy was the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire,
Prince Metternich. He was opposed to constitutionalism as much as
to nationalism because he realized that the rulers of the petty Ger-
man and Italian states, if they were ever forced to give way to
liberal pressure, would be taking the first step toward not only
their own destruction but that of the Hapsburg Empire. The health
of the empire depended on maintaining its eighteenth-century en-
vironment. To that aim Metternich devoted himself, and he suc-
ceeded in using for his purpose the international system established
at the Congress of Vienna. He thereby identified the system with de-
fense of the past, and ensured Britain's eventual secession from it.

II Great Britain and the Concert of Europe

THE FEAR of France drew Europe together. It made every state,
large and small, to some degree aware of its stake in the status quo,

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

only perfect security . . . and that their true wisdom is to keep
down the petty contentions of ordinary times and to stand together
in the support of the established principles of social order." Neither
he nor his Tory colleagues, however, believed that the principles of
social order had to be supported by a continuous and ubiquitous
policing of the Continent. Only a palpable crisis justified interven-
tion. A demonstration by German students, a revolution in Naples
or Spain to call such affairs threats to the general peace savored
to the Britisli of hysteria. Their view, so thoroughly at odds with
the Austrian that it wrecked the concert, -was not the arbitrary
opinion of a particular cabinet. It was as much the outgrowth of
Britain's position as Metternich's was the outgrowth of Austria's.

Since her emergence as a major European power Britain's concern
with Europe had been limited. Before 1793 she had fought in de-
fense of her Continental interests - in the Low Countries, in Gi-
braltar, in Hanover and also for her interests overseas; after 1793
she had fought primarily to prevent French dominance of Europe.
Now her interests were secure on the Continent and overseas, and
no power or group of powers was striving for European hegemony.
The traditional reasons for her intervention therefore disappeared,
and she reverted to her underlying tradition of aloofness.

She could not share Metternichs fear. Nationalism held no terrors
for her at home, now that the whole of the British Isles seemed to be
growing into a single people, and in the empire the trend of her
policy since 1783 had been away from the Austrian concept of re-
pression. As for liberalism, she had never fought it as such or dis-
covered how it could be perverted by an occupying army, and she
did not dread it The middle-class European liberals were no Dan-
tons or Robespierres; they had due respect for property and its
political rights, and a touching admiration for the British system.
To aid in suppressing their parliamentary aspirations was out of the
question for a cabinet accountable to the mother of parliaments.
Even a Tory government, reactionary as it might be in domestic
affairs, was committed in foreign policy to opposing its reactionary
allies. The commitment derived partly from the nature of British in-
terests, partly from the sympathies of the British public, and it grew
more apparent with the years.

By the early 1820*8 the British position was in sharp contrast to
the Austrian. Metternich insisted that public order was indivisible,

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

concert. It will necessarily involve us deeply,** he said, "in all the
politics of the Continent, whereas our true policy has always been
not to interfere except in great emergencies, and then with a com-
manding force." When Britain interfered in 1823, the fact that she
possessed commanding force precluded a great emergency. She no-
tified the French government that she opposed transatlantic inter-
vention, and the whole scheme collapsed. The Royal Navy could not
help liberals in Spain, but it could in South America.

Britain's defiance of the concert had another aspect, far more
important in the long run than her aid to liberalism. Her economic
interest in the independence of the Spanish colonies was equaled
by the political interest of the United States; tie two countries had
for the first time a common objective that produced complementary
policies. Joint action proved impossible, and Britain took her stand
alone; the United States then took hers in a slightly more advanced
position. Canning served notice on France in October 1823. In
December President Monroe delivered to Congress the message
known since as the Monroe Doctrine.

The President enunciated three principles of American policy.
The United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of any
European state or of its existing colonies; she would not tolerate
European interference in the affairs of any independent state in the
western hemisphere; she considered the hemisphere closed hence-
forth to colonization by European powers. In theory these principles
rested upon the sole and sovereign will of the United States, but
in practice theory was absurd. The United States had no army or
navy with which to make her will sovereign; the idea of her in-
tervening in Europe was only slightly more ridiculous than the idea
of her resisting European intervention in the Americas. But her
words were not challenged for another forty years because she had
behind her the authority of the Royal Navy.

Monroe's message was welcomed by the British public. Some avid
imperialists resented its ban on colonization, but the President's tim-
ing had precluded official resentment: if the British government re-
pudiated his third principle and accepted the other two, it would
imply that it had broken with the concert of Europe in order to be
a dog in the colonial manger. Her current interests, furthermore,
were in trade rather than conquest, and she tacitly accepted her role
as underwriter of the American position, Thomas Jefferson had ex-

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

in revolt. Serbian developments aroused little interest in London,
but Greece was another question. It concerned many segments of
the British public, and the government could not remain aloof.

From the strategic standpoint Britain had reason to support the
Turk as a defense against Russia. The Greeks looked for Russian
help, and the Czar stood to gain by providing it. When Alexander
was succeeded by his hard-headed brother Nicholas in 1825, it be-
came apparent that Russia was about to act to flout Metternich's
principles, the British believed, in order to create a satellite on the
Aegean and take the Ottoman Empire in flank if and when Russia
wished to advance on the Bosporus. The obvious British counter-
move was to support the Sultan, but the move was out of the ques-
tion. The Turkish government, though still known as the Sublime
Porte, was an international pariah, and its behavior toward the
Greeks shocked Europe. It not only repaid massacres in kind, but
hanged the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople and three archbish-
ops in their Easter vestments. The Sultan next turned for help to
his vassal, the Pasha of Egypt, whose fleet soon cut off the Greeks
from supplies by sea while his army began to exterminate them.
Their plight became a European crisis.

In Russia, France, and Britain the Greek cause seized the public
imagination. Aristocrats, trained to know the classic world better
than their own, saw in the peasants of the Morea the heroes whom
Miltiades had led, and in the Pasha the new Darius. Liberals turned
from their own frustrations to gathering money, supplies, and vol-
unteers for a people worse oppressed than they were. Romantic
poets by the score poured out their passionate sympathy, and the
most romantic of them all gave both sympathy and life. Lord Byron
dead was worth an army to the Greeks.

The successes of the Egyptians increased public excitement and
accelerated intervention. In the summer of 1827 Russia, France, and
Britain decided to force a settlement on the Porte by a naval demon-
stration, which led them inadvertently into sinking the Egyptian
fleet in Navarino Bay. The battle saved the Greeks for the moment,
but it frightened the British government back into inactivity. Can-
ning was dead, and the Duke of Wellington, who became Prime
Minister at the beginning of 1828, was terrified of destroying the
Ottoman Empire. Not so the Czar. He went to war with the Porte

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

and they diagnosed these as symptoms of incipient revolt. The only
medicine they knew was repression.

The malady, though less acute than they thought, was real. Its
chief causes lay in industrial developments of the war and post-
war years. By 1815 British industry was geared to produce more
than an impoverished Continent could absorb; the subsequent years
of retrenchment brought bankruptcies, unemployment, and a fall in
the general wage level. The resultant distress would normally have
been mitigated by a fall in food prices with the importation of cheap
European grain. But the landed interests passed the corn law of
1815, a tariff on foreign grain for the benefit of the domestic pro-
ducer, and the law kept food prices high regardless of wages. The
sight of the landowners enriching themselves while the poor went
without bread did not endear the government to the masses.

The Tory leaders knew little about economics. It was still an
adolescent science, largely ignored in their conservative education,
and they were ill equipped to deal with economic maladjustments.
Instead they struck at the results at crime through a harsh admin-
istration of the penal and game laws, at political agitation through
curbing the right of assembly and the freedom of the press. The
root of their measures was fear. They had no police force worth the
name, and their army was neither large nor reliable enough to pro-
tect them against mob violence. Their traditional protection was
their own prestige: a squire was obeyed because he expected to be.
Now the Tories' fear was driving them to the one course that might
make the fear come true. The ruthlessness of worried magistrates,
the use of troops against innocuous gatherings, the hiring of inform-
ers who fabricated plots with the glibness of Titus Gates such
methods were rapidly depriving the regime of its title to respect.
Even intelligent oligarchs were coming to realize that some measure
of reform was the only means of self -preservation.

The first sign of a breach between government and governed came
in 1820. The death of the aged King, who had been insane for the
past decade, brought the Prince Regent to the throne as George IV.
The new monarch was a reactionary middle-aged rake, and almost
his first act was to demand proceedings for a divorce from his wife.
Queen Caroline was a flighty lady of doubtful morals, but her hus-
band's were beyond doubt. The official attempt to prove her an
adulteress made her the heroine of the hour. Popular dislike of the

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

larly among the poorest peasants; they became virtually enslaved to
their landlords by the desperate competition for leases, and lived on
the edge of starvation. Many would have gone over the edge if they
had not had one of the cheapest known foods, the potato, as their
staff of life. But the potato is highly sensitive to blight. The appear-
ance of the potato disease meant famine, and might mean rioting or
even rebellion. The British position in Ireland depended in great
measure upon the activities of a microscopic fungus.

A serious famine struck in 1822, and the hungry were soon ripe for
agitators. The emancipation movement, which had been kept alive
in Dublin since the union, spread rapidly from the middle class to
the masses. The leader of the movement was Daniel O'Connell, a
brilliant orator, organizer, and tactician. Like Grattan fifty years be-
fore, O'Connell succeeded in identifying his narrow political objec-
tive with the cause of Irish nationalism. The Ulster Presbyterians
naturally held aloof, but Catholics with diverse grievances rallied to
the cause peasants embittered by tithes and stewards and hunger,
patriots who still resented the union, politicians eager for seats in
Parliament, priests dreaming of new freedom for the Church. Ex-
citement mounted rapidly. It reached a peak in 1828 with the elec-
tion of O'Connell to a Parliament for which he was ineligible. When
the borough-mongers could not control the electoral machine, the
Protestant ascendancy had indeed descended. The alternative to
emancipation was clearly revolt.

The position of the cabinet was awkward. The Greek crisis was
still threatening, and the domestic situation was even more so.
O'Connell had enough British support so that the outbreak of fight-
ing in Ireland would in all likelihood overturn the government and
bring the Whigs to power, to initiate their parliamentary reforms.
As the Tory leader, Wellington was committed to opposing eman-
cipation, and his lieutenant in the Commons, Sir Robert Peel, had
been stoutly against it. But they were confronted with a choice of
evils, and they decided that surrender to the Irish Catholics was
better than surrender to the Whigs. The bulk of their party, de-
serted by its chiefs, fought a losing battle against the concession. In
April 1829 Catholics were admitted to Parliament.

Emancipation determined the future development of the Irish
problem. The Protestant minority, it is true, retained a dispropor-
tionate influence, and the social and economic ills that were taproots

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

In July came a revolution in France. The Bourbon regime, grown
reactionary, was overthrown with surprising ease and superseded
by a limited, moderate, and liberal monarchy; the change was en-
gineered and carefully controlled by the middle class, and the new
sovereign, Louis-Philippe, was himself respectably bourgeois. His
moderation was soon put to the test by a revolt in Belgium, which
split that country away from Holland and threatened to make it an
appendage of revolutionary France. The new French regime yielded
to pressure from Britain, however, and eventually joined with her in
defying Metternich and supervising the creation of an independent
Belgium. Such level-headedness in Paris was a far cry from the Jac-
obin attitude of 1792-3, and the contrast was noted across the
Channel.

These developments were an object lesson for the British elec-
torate in the years 1830-2. If a violent revolution could be dammed
into liberal channels and made to behave, what became of the Tory
argument that peaceful reform would open the floodgates of anar-
chy? The argument and the party were repudiated. King William's
first parliament had been in session only a few weeks when Welling-
ton resigned, and a half-century of Tory rule was ended. The new
Whig ministry, under the premiership of Earl Grey, promptly began
the drafting of an act "to amend the representation of the people of
England and Wales.** Britain was in the first throes of revolution by
consent.

IV Liberalism and the Reform Bill

WHILE Toryism had been decaying, the Whigs had been gradu-
ally in many cases reluctantly acquiring a liberal creed. Its prin-
ciples derived from the Whig tradition of the seventeenth century
as modified by the political and economic revolutions of the eight-
eenth, by the religious fervor of the evangelicals, and by the ration-
alist spirit The product was classical liberalism, one of the cardinal
factors in the development of nineteenth-century thought. The lib-
eral program was both concrete and Utopian, and for decades after
1830 it progressed from triumph to triumph. Its success seemed to
be irrefutable proof of its validity. By the 1850*8 Great Britain was
so liberal and so prosperous that only heretics dared question the
causal relationship between her principles and her position. Her-

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

franchise giving predominance to landholders. The Whigs, on the
contrary, insisted that all forms of property should be given equal
weight that every one of sufficient substance, regardless of what
he lived on or where he lived, should have an equal voice. This
could be achieved only by reform of two sorts. The disparate elec-
toral systems in the boroughs, where representatives were chosen in
one case by a landlord, in another by a close corporation, in a third
by virtually universal manhood suffrage, would have to be replaced
by uniform property qualifications for the vote. The rotten boroughs
would have to be abolished and new constituencies created in the
new centers of wealth and population. Thus the Whig program had
two parts, a standardization of voting requirements and wholesale
reapportionment. Both were to the interests of the industrialists,
whose wealth was rarely in land and whose strength was in poorly
represented areas. Both were anathema to the landed interest, whose
power depended upon the inequalities of suffrage and apportion-
ment.

If the Whigs could not appeal to the people as champions of de-
mocracy, they could and did appeal as champions of popular liber-
ties. The Tories had carried their emphasis on strong government so
far that the nation identified it with repressive government. The
Whig tradition, on the other hand, stressed the rights of the subject,
and the tradition had now matured into a theory of government, ac-
cording to which the primary function of the state is to guarantee to
each citizen the greatest degree of liberty compatible with that of
his fellows. On the positive side, the state maintains order and en-
sures due process of law; on the negative side it eliminates all arti-
ficial restrictions, statutory and otherwise, that benefit a particular
group or interest at the cost of the general welfare. Laissez f aire
leave society alone, and it will regulate itself by the competition of
the individuals who compose it; if each is as free as possible to fol-
low his own interest, the result will be the greatest possible good for
alL Here was the core of the liberal creed.

Laissez f aire derived from many sources. One was the distrust of
government that the Whigs inherited from seventeenth-century Pu-
ritanism; they regarded government as a necessary evil even when
they controlled it themselves, and the more it governed the worse it
was. Another source was the rationalistic optimism of the eighteenth
century: only a faith in man's inherent goodness justifies the doc-

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

a subordinate kind of citizenship that violated his ideal of self-
government. For economic and political reasons, therefore, he
wished to extend colonial autonomy as fast as possible.

Much of his liberal program was still embryonic when the Whigs
came to power in the autumn of 1830. The one fully developed issue
was parliamentary reform* Earl Grey had a majority in the Lower
House, but in the lords the Tory old guard was still firmly en-
trenched. It had lost ground steadily since Castlereagr/s death, and
now it was driven back to the innermost citadel of the constitution.
The lords' power of veto could be circumvented only if the King
chose to create enough new peers, and William, although he favored
reform, was strongly opposed to such drastic coercion. Here, then,
was the pattern of revolution: an obdurate minority with the deter-
mination and the legal right to block the majority will.

Even the narrow electorate had deserted the Tories. When Grey
dissolved Parliament in 1831 to seek a specific mandate, the voters
triumphantly vindicated the Whig slogan of **the bill> the whole bill,
and nothing but the bill." The lords threw out the bill. The com-
mon people whom it did not enfranchise, but who sensed, that
change was to their interest responded with serious riots. The cri-
sis came to a head in the spring of 1832, when the King refused to
create the necessary peers and the ministry resigned. Wellington
desperately tried to govern but could not. He resigned in favor of
Grey, who at last obtained the King's agreement to coerce the lords;
to save the Crown from being humiliated and the aristocracy from
being swamped, the Duke withdrew his opposition. The titled die-
hards stayed away from the Upper House, and the measure became
law.

The effect on the old order did not seem catastrophic. The bill
eliminated the worst of the rotten boroughs, increased the represen-
tation of the industrial areas, and created a roughly uniform quali-
fication for voting in town and country; in substance the result was
to enfranchise the middle class shopkeepers, industrialists, mer-
chants, well-to-do farmers. The electorate was more than tripled,
and the basis of the oligarchy was proportionately broadened. But
it remained an oligarchy. The new bourgeois elements of strength in
the nation had battered against the door of an aristocratic parlia-
ment; the aristocrats had held the door until the whole house threat-
ened to fall on them, and then had opened to let in their opponents.

221

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

to the subsistence level, but the principal results had been to un-
dermine the self-respect of the workers, to free the employers from
the necessity of paying a living wage, and to impose a crushing bur-
den on the taxpayers. The new poverty created by the Industrial
Revolution, like the new wealth, required a sweeping reform, which
was begun by the act of 1834.

The system there established was intended to decrease pauperism
by forcing the able-bodied poor to choose between employment and
what was virtually prison. The dole was largely eliminated; the par-
ishes were grouped into districts, each with a workhouse, and the
inmates of the houses were set to labor on a near-starvation diet.
An elected board of guardians in each district was supervised by a
poor-law commission in London. The commissioners used to the full
their authority under the act; they, rather than Parliament, gave
form to the new system. Here -was the liberal's ideal instrument, a
centralized, efficient bureaucracy with power adequate for its task.
The needful social surgery was performed with a minimum of con-
fusion and expense. The able-bodied poor soon found that almost
any form of employment was preferable to the workhouse; the man-
ufacturers were thereby assured of abundant cheap labor, and the
cost of relief to the taxpayer was cut in half.

But efficiency was purchased at a price. English country lif e re-
ceived a jolt from which it never recovered. Previously the major
concern of the parish and the justices of the peace had been with
poor relief ; the Elizabethan principle that each parish should look
after its own had grown into the fabric of the community, and was
accepted by every one from squire to pauper. This parochial self-
sufficiency had its evil side in the waste and corruption of amateur
administration. It also had its good side in the sense of responsibility
inculcated in the rural gentry. That sense was the root of the gentle-
man's power. Now it was withering in every parish in England, and
the time was coming when

the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we. 1

The poor law accentuated the distinction between this new peo-
ple and the proletariat, for the workhouses made the poor man con-

i G. K. Chesterton: "The Secret People.** Reprinted by permission of Dodd,
Mead & Company from The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, copyright,
1932, by Dodd, Mead & Company.

"3

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

alone; they must find allies, if not leaders, within the privileged or-
der itself. So the popularism of the Puritan Revolution developed
as a result, not a cause, of the aristocratic and middle-class revolt
against prerogative, and was suppressed because it ran counter to
the interests of Cromwell's new oligarchs. So also with the revolu-
tion that began at the death of George IV. Its impetus came from
an alliance of unprivileged industrialists and privileged Whigs; the
triumph of the alliance touched off the popularism of the chartists,
and they failed, like the Levellers, because their aims were anath-
ema to the oligarchy. Only later, when the oligarchs split into
factions and some of them sought support from demos, did the
points of the people's charter begin to find their way onto the stat-
ute book.

Chartist agitation reached its climax in the beginning of a new
reign. In 1837 William IV died and was succeeded by his eighteen-
year-old niece, Victoria. On her depended the future of the mon-
archy. The recent sequence o a senile and insane king, then a dis-
solute and reactionary king, then a genial but undignified king had
tarnished the crown until it meant little to the nation. Victoria had
to refurbish it, and she did. Her youth and her lonely position in the
limelight appealed to the chivalry of a romantic age; her rigid stand-
ards of conduct, her patience under stress, even her insistence on
what she conceived to be her rights were middle-class virtues as
intelligible in her as in any housewife; her dignity, above all, added
respect to affection and understanding. She was far from a great
woman, but she was superbly fitted for her job.

She needed all her qualities during the first decade of the reign,
for it was a period of perennial crises. By 1839 the outbreak of a
chartist revolution seemed to be imminent. The government acted
with phenomenal good sense; it did almost nothing to repress verbal
agitation, yet massed enough military force to discourage violence.
A few riots, one minor insurrection, and the emergency passed. It
never recurred with the same intensity. The workers were losing
faith in the chartists, and a wholly different form of propaganda was
turning their energies into a new movement.

That movement was directed against the corn law. Demands for
the political rights of the masses gave place to demands for the eco-
nomic rights of all consumers, and this transformation, effected
largely by middle-class liberals, had a profound effect on the work-

"5

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

a propaganda machine as the world had yet encountered. In 1838 a
group of Lancashire manufacturers founded the Anti-Corn-Law
League. The moving spirits were Richard Cobden and John Bright,
the two outstanding prophets of mid-century liberalism. They op-
posed governmental intervention of almost any sort, at home or
abroad, and preached against the ultimate social sin of war their
new gospel of internationalism founded on free trade. The whole
gospel was implicit in the campaign against the corn law, and they
brought to bear upon that narrow issue the force of their reasoning
and their passionate moral conviction. The league they inspired
grew by leaps and bounds. In the eight years between its founding
and its triumph it remade public thinking on economic matters, cap-
tured the Whig party, and eventually shattered the Tories.

The League, true to the rationalism of the liberal creed, rested its
case upon logic. The gist of its argument was that the corn law ben-
efited a small minority at the expense of the nation at large. Britain
was no longer self-sufficient in her food supply, and the pretense
that she could be which was the Tory justification for the tariff
was disproved by the high price of domestic grain. Her prosperity
now depended more on industry than agriculture, and the corn law
impeded industrial expansion. By limiting the natural exchange of
foreign grain for British goods, the law forced the grain-growing
countries into an unnatural and competitive industrialization. By
keeping domestic food prices high, and with them wages and pro-
duction costs, it impeded the sale of British goods abroad. It was a
tribute, in short, levied upon the new economy by the vested inter-
est of the old.

This general line of argument was adapted to particular groups.
The agricultural laborers were assured that a fall in the price of
bread would more than compensate them for any decline in their
wages; the farmers were told that repeal would lower their rents;
the industrial workers were fired with the prospect of cheap bread,
a luxury transformed into a staple, and the manufacturers were fired
with the prospect of a drastic wage cut. The campaign was carried
to every part of the island by every known technique vast sums in
subscriptions, investigators paid to exploit the evils of protection,
endless mass meetings, campaign buttons, pamphlets by the mil-
lions. This was political agitation of a sort never seen before. It took
no account of social status or occupation, of the gulf between the

127

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

splitting his party. A group of his personal followers, the Peelites of
future years, followed him into alliance with the Whigs, and in May
1846 this odd majority pushed the bill through the commons. In the
lords the Duke of Wellington once more helped a cause he de-
tested; rt it is a damned mess/* was his comment, "but I must look to
the peace of the country and the Queen." His great prestige, backed
by the memory of 1832, induced the peers to pass repeal. That
same night Peel lost his ephemeral majority in the Lower House; he
had stolen the Whigs* thunder and betrayed the protectionist Tories,
and they combined against him. He resigned for the last time, his
work completed and his career destroyed.

Repeal also destroyed the old Tory party. Its liberal wing broke
off and eventually coalesced with the Whigs, who for the next
twenty years were in the ascendant. This was the first but not the
last major party schism: the Liberals split in 1886 and the Conserv-
atives in 1906, and in all three cases their opponents acquired a long
tenure of office. But the Tory debacle of 1846 was even more than a
schism. The Reform Bill had sucked the marrow from the party's
principles, as the Glorious Revolution had from the principles of an
earlier Toryism. The years after reform were a breathing spell for
the rank and file. They gathered themselves for the last battle
against the advancing liberals, but their campaign had been lost
before the battle was fought. Their program was at bottom the de-
fense of a status quo that had become indefensible, and the out-
come was the eclipse of Toryism.

The Irish emergency that had occasioned repeal was not cured by
it. The food shortage of 1846 developed into a catastrophic famine.
During the next five years almost a million Irish died; another mil-
lion emigrated, and bore with them the conviction that the blame
for the famine rested squarely on the British. Unrest in Ireland came
to a head in 1848, but the government was more successful in coer-
cion than in feeding. Rebellion was put down, and the depopulated
island sank into such torpor that it ceased temporarily to be a ma-
jor problem.

In Britain the crisis of 1846 began the apogee of liberalism. The
new doctrine had largely won over the Whigs by 1830, and now
brought the most progressive of the Tories into the Whig fold; even
the name of the newly reinforced party was changing from Whig to
Liberal. Its economic ideas were triumphant. The end of the corn

229

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

free trade, was central less because it was economically sound than
because it promised peace on earth. In the decade of the 1850's pro-
tectionists, militarists, imperialists seemed to be retreating before
the light and leaving the future to the sons of light. "The liberal/* it
was written, "deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he
stand." 3

The optimism of this faith was to a great extent the unconscious
reflection of Britain's position in the world. She was still in the high
noon of the Pax Britannica* The foundations of her peace were less
permanent than they seemed, but as yet they were imposing. In the
spheres of activity to which she largely confined herself she still had
no serious rival. In the economic sphere her industry was in a posi-
tion of pre-eminence verging on monopoly, her merchant marine
was larger and busier than ever, and Lombard Street was the finan-
cial center of the globe; much of the world's wealth was in her
hands, and with it power. In the political sphere the states of Eu-
rope were in an equilibrium that permitted her to devote most of
her attention to her interests overseas. In the military sphere her de-
velopment was taking the course indicated by the political situation:
because she seemed unlikely to intervene in a major Continental
war her army was stagnating in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition,
while her navy maintained the post-Trafalgar standard of superior-
ity to any two fleets that might combine against it. This naval force,
so overwhelming that it rarely had to be used, was the framework
of power within which the colonies developed toward the modern
dominions.

The liberals accepted the framework, little as it accorded with
their pacific principles, and worked within it to refashion imperial
ties. During the first three decades of Victoria's reign Britain's colo-
nial policy underwent a transformation as drastic as that of her do-
mestic constitution. A new concept of self-government took form in
institutions, statutes, and ways of thought, and out of it grew the
British Commonwealth of the twentieth century. This vast political
experiment was largely the outgrowth of early-Victorian liberalism,
and was one of its major bequests to posterity.

The character of the experiment was also determined by certain
external factors in the Victorian era. One was the lull in European
expansion. The great age of mercantile imperialism had ended with

3 Isaiah, 32.87

231

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

Zealand trespassed upon the land of the Maoris, or the Dutch of
Cape Colony attacked the Kaffirs, the result was likely to be clamor
from the missionaries, questions in Parliament, and action by the
home government to protect the natives. Such action would run
counter, in all probability, to the wishes of the white settlers. Thus
the missionary spirit, on the frontiers of empire and in the mother
country, tended to curtail colonial autonomy in the name of native
rights.

The missionaries were not the only group working in this direc-
tion. Another school of thought advocated restraint for economic
rather than religious reasons. These scientific reformers, as they
considered themselves, argued that the home government should
control such undeveloped colonial lands as were suitable for farm-
ing, and allot them to carefully chosen settlers; in this way the tide
of emigration, channeled from London, would increase population
and prosperity overseas until the colonies were strong enough to
take from the British taxpayer the burden of their own defense. The
reformers influenced government, although they never persuaded it
to adopt their program in its entirety, and they also formed char-
tered colonizing companies to put their theories into practice. Aus-
tralian immigration grew with such speed, thanks largely to their
efforts, that what had been predominantly penal settlements in 1830
became viable, self-governing colonies by 1850. In New Zealand
progress was equally phenomenal, although there the Crown re-
tained an element of control for the protection of the Maoris. Both
these nascent dominions throve on the work of the reformers, and
soon outgrew the need of it.

A third group carried the political and economic premises of lib-
eralism to their logical conclusion and rejected the -whole idea of
empire. This school developed a strong argument in terms of Brit-
ain's welfare. The traditional justification of imperialism as profita-
ble to the mother country tad disappeared along with the mercan-
tilist system. In an era of free trade Britain's colonies brought her
little economic gain that they would not bring as independent
states, and they imposed upon her a heavy burden of defense. By
the 1850*s her military establishment was costing almost 4,000,000
a year; her forces were dispersed over the globe, and she faced the
ever-present danger of being dragged into war by the blunder of a
colonial government or the greed of a foreign power. Because the

'Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

theme was the necessity for putting the government of Canada into
the hands of the Canadians. He advocated an executive responsible
to the local legislature on all matters of domestic concern, and to the
Crown only on matters demonstrably touching the welfare of the
empire at large. This proposal was drastic indeed. It meant turning
over almost complete control of their own affairs to provinces lately
in rebellion.

The British government had the courage to make the experiment.
In 1840 Upper and Lower Canada were joined, and in 1847 Lord
Elgin was made Governor of the newly united colony; he and the
Colonial Secretary, Lord Grey, proceeded to implement the "Report
in constitutional practice. Elgin withdrew into a neutrality as com-
plete as that of the Queen at home and refused, under extreme
provocation, to intervene in domestic affairs. The real executive be-
came the cabinet responsible to the colonial parliament, and over
the years the jurisdiction of this government steadily increased. By
the 1860*s the Canadians' fear of economic and political subordina-
tion to the United States stimulated a movement to combine the
eastern maritime provinces with Canada proper; the main step was
taken in 1867, and soon thereafter the whole of British North Amer-
ica except Newfoundland was included in the Dominion of Canada.
This vast federal state, spanning the continent, was the first born in
the British Commonwealth of Nations. It was created primarily by
the Canadians themselves. But credit is also due to a succession of
British statesmen, from Durham to Gladstone, who had the courage
of their liberalism.

In South Africa the efforts of much the same statesmen were lead-
ing, through one difficulty after another, down the long road to war.
The bulk of the white population was descended from the original
Dutch settlers, and a gulf of time separated these Boers from the
British administrators in Capetown and London. Since the seven-
teenth century the Boers had been a self-contained and almost un-
changing cultural island, cut off from Europe by distance and the
autocratic rule of the Dutch East India Company; they would have
been far more comprehensible to Cromwell or William III than they
were to the bureaucracy of the Colonial Office. They were a no-
madic people who required thousands of acres for each family; they
lived much as the patriarchs of Israel, and their Calvinism was close
to the faith of Israel. They also had the frontiersman's independence

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

zens, but they were encircling Cape Colony with independent states
that had access to the sea and might make contact with outside pow-
ers, and they were stirring the natives to fury. After much hesita-
tion Britain annexed Natal and extended her sovereignty to the
Vaal. Soon afterward she changed her tune, partly because the
Boers were incensed and partly because the European situation was
threatening; in 1852-^4 she recognized the virtual independence of
the two Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
The problem then entered a new phase.

Between 1815 and 1854 the shortcomings of British policy were
only in part the result of inherent difficulties. They were also the re-
sult of contradictions between two different schools of liberal
thought. Missionary influence was exerted to protect the natives, by
treaty terms if possible and by outright annexation if necessary. The
anti-imperialists were categorically opposed to annexation, and
were inclined to leave the Boers and blacks to fight out their quar-
rels. This conflict of opinion in Britain produced vacillation in South
Africa, and vacillation produced a profound distrust among the
Boers. The grant of autonomy did not wipe out their bitter memo-
ries, or make them more tactful in dealing with the natives, or estab-
lish once and for all that they had ceased to be British citizens.

For the next decade and more the Boers, in their self-contained
republics, retired from contact with the world of the nineteenth
century. But to the south of them the pressures of that world were
mounting, and the veldt although no one yet knew it concealed
enough riches to draw adventurers from the corners of the earth. It
was only a question of time before Boer seclusion would be shat-
tered, Boer fury aroused, and South Africa plunged into crisis. This
was the cost of the liberals* failure to solve the problem. Perhaps
they could never have solved it, given their principles and the na-
ture of the Boer. In any case they did not solve it, when reason and
forbearance were in the ascendant. In later years, when the cult of
force had revived, the problem grew and was solved by other means.

In the empire as a whole, seen from the perspective of another
century, liberal policy in this period was as impressive as colonial
development. In 1832 the major colonies were mere toeholds on the
edge of great land masses, toeholds won by a commercial people in-
tent on doing business across the seas; the colonists were few and
often divided among themselves, and the vast resources of the hin-

237

Revolution by Consent , 1815-1867

unwonted and even illiberal militance in British policy. At the same
time the liberal creed was being challenged at home by the rise of
a dynamic conservatism. These two trends, one in foreign affairs
and one in political theory, foreshadowed drastic changes to come.

The Whig triumph in 1846 did not mean the beginning of an iso-
lationist era. Even liberal politicians were aware that eternal vig-
ilance was the price of the Pax Britannica. Among them was Vis-
count Palmerston, the outstanding spokesman of Britain's rights and
prestige. He had begun as a Canningite Tory and never became a
typical Liberal. His metier was foreign affairs, and in the 1830's and
1840's he seemed to be Britain's permanent foreign secretary. His
haughty tone and forceful acts had made him notorious in the chan-
celleries of Europe. **As the Roman in the days of old held himself
free from indignity when he could say civts Romanus sum" Palmer-
ston declared in 1850, "so also a British subject, in whatever land he
may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong
arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong." Here
was the imperial spirit rejoicing in its power. But it was power, to
Palmerston's mind, used not merely for British subjects but for the
weak and oppressed wherever they might be; the universality of his
concern with injustice was as marked as the vehemence of his con-
cern with Britain's position, and both were enormously popular. His
arrogance and sense of drama appealed to a public grown bored
with the logical, conciliatory tone of more orthodox liberals.

By 1850 die Europe with which he had to deal was no longer the
familiar one of Metternich. In 1848 a wave of revolutions had mo-
mentarily drowned the old order in central Europe. The Hapsburg
Empire had been torn into its national segments, and German and
Italian liberals had seized their opportunity. Their attempts to unify
their nations had failed, however, and by 1850 the forces of reaction
had patched together the former frame of things; German and Ital-
ian patriots were forced thereafter to look to other means of unifi-
cationthe means of Machiavelli, of duplicity and force. But if
liberalism had spent itself, so had conservatism; Austria and Prussia
W ere temporarily weakened by the after effects of revolution. The
balance of power was altered, and France and Russia acquired freer
play for their ambitions.

France was entering her last period of predominance in western
Europe. The pedestrian regime of Louis-Philippe had given place

239

Revolution by Coment^ 1815-1867

Himalayas was coming uncomfortably close to the borders of India,
and Russian pressure on the Turk was even more disturbing. The
three-sided balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean was be-
coming unbalanced. It had functioned for twenty years because
neither France, Russia, nor Britain had been willing to push her
designs to the point of war with the other two. Now Russia, freed
from the likelihood of Austrian intervention on her Sank, was turn-
ing her eyes again toward the straits. Simultaneously the French
Emperor was scheming to upset the status quo for his own ends.
This conflict of ambitions drew Britain into war for the first time
since Waterloo.

Napoleon was eager for an entente with Britain, and at the same
time he was seeking a cause to unify the discordant domestic ele-
ments liberal, chauvinist, Catholic on which his new empire de-
pended. He saw in the tangled affairs of the Sultan the chance to
achieve both ends. In 1850 he secured from the Porte the recogni-
tion of French influence over Roman Catholic monks in the Holy
Land. Czar Nicholas, incensed, countered with the far more sweep-
ing demand that Russia be recognized as protector of all the Sultans
Orthodox Christian subjects. This daim undermined Turkish in-
dependence, and London was no more disposed than Paris to coun-
tenance it. Even if tie Turk were as sick a man as Nicholas said,
Russia could scarcely be allowed to monopolize the inheritance and
then arrange for the demise. The Czar's army invaded the Ruma-
nian principalities, a sphere of particular Russian interest within the
Ottoman Empire. The Anglo-French fleet was then ordered to the
Dardanelles, and the crisis came to a boil.

The British cabinet was seriously split. On one side were the
orthodox liberals, trusting to negotiation and opposing any provoc-
ative acts. On the other were the proponents of the strong line,
chief among them Palmerston; he was convinced that Russia must
be halted, by war if necessary, and that the best chance of peace
lay in making Britain's position clear. This conflict of views vitiated
policy. The chance that Britain would stand aside led the Czar to
press his demands; the chance that she would intervene led the
Sultan to resist. None of the principals desired war. But the Czar
had been maneuvered into a position from which he could not re-
tire without humiliation; the Sultan knew the impossibility of
opposing Russia single-handed, and he now had the likelihood of

241

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

effects. It helped to prevent joint action by France and Britain in
America during the long crisis of the Civil War, and it was of in-
calculable benefit to Prussia in the unification of Germany. It re-
versed the Anglo-French rapprochement that had existed, despite
occasional quarrels, ever since 1830, and of which the Crimean War
was both the climax and conclusion.

The British could scarcely have relied on France, in any case, to
guarantee the Peace of Paris. Such interests as she had in the Near
East were traditionally focused in Egypt, where they were almost as
unwelcome to the British as those of the Czar in Constantinople. A
more logical British partner would have been Austria, whose terri-
torial concern with the Balkans complemented Britain's naval con-
cern with the straits. But Austria's strength was increasingly ab-
sorbed in the attempt to hold her own in Germany and Italy, and
she was no more to be counted upon than France to keep the Rus-
sians in line. Great Britain alone was committed to maintaining at
least the substance of the treaty terms. The integrity of the Sultan's
dominions, once she had spilled her blood for it, became a cardinal
tenet of her policy, and the Crimean War consequently opened a
struggle with Russia that has since been twice suspended but is not
yet resolved.

The struggle involved more than the Ottoman Empire. Russian
pressure in the Middle East, which had been mounting for years,
helped to produce a crisis in India. For a generation the East India
Company had been alarmed by the spread of Russian influence
through Persia and Afghanistan, and had responded by a rapid ex-
tension of its own authority westward and northwestward to fore-
stall a Russian attack. One native state after another had been an-
nexed or reduced to dependence, until the Company governed
from the Bay of Bengal to the Khyber Pass. This extension and the
attendant reforms upset the conservatism of native ways and inter-
ests. Simultaneously the means of dealing with discontent were
gravely impaired: tibe sepoy army was overworked and spread thin
across the new conquest just when the core of British troops was
depleted by withdrawals to Europe, and tales of British blunders
and defeats in the Crimea began to erode the prestige on which
white rule was founded.

The result was the explosion of the Sepoy Mutiny, which during
the summer and autumn of 1857 jeopardized the existence of the

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

VIII The New Toryism

SINCE the death of Pitt the Tory Party had been on the defensive.
By denying the need for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary
reform it had lost the liberal followers of Canning; by identifying it-
self with the landed interest against the new forces of industrialism
it had lost the Peelites. The upshot after 1846 was a body of men
whose spirit was demoralized and whose thought was fossilized.
Fashioning a modern party out of such ingredients was a herculean
task.

The brunt of the work fell on one leader, Benjamin Disraeli, who
devoted forty years to it. He worked out his own conception of
Toryism while he was rising to influence within the party, between
his first election to Parliament in 1837 and the Peelite schism of
1846; then he gradually educated the party leadership in his ideas;
lastly, in 1867, he assumed the leadership himself, and in the next
decade brought the revivified party into office with a substantial ma-
jority. By then the new Toryism was so firmly established that it still
survives.

No outline of Disraeli's career can give an inkling of its diffi-
culties. At the start they seemed insuperable. In 1837 he was a
young Jewish novelist and political pamphleteer, with a taste for
fantastic clothes, sitting in the House of Commons among men who
judged an aspirant by his wealth, birth, and connections. Disraeli
did not belong, and he 'was never gladly accepted by the members
of his party. They distrusted him for substantially the same reason
that their counterparts of the 193Cfs distrusted Churchill "too bril-
liant to be sound." But they could not keep him down for long be-
cause he had something to say. After 1846 the rest of them did not;
their rump party had no mission except to deplore. A conservative
out of power is often capable of enlightenment; his hunger for office
leads him to accept new ideas, and on this hunger Disraeli played.
If the Tories continued to resist all change, he argued, the Whigs
would acquire "a monopoly of power, under the specious title of
a monopoly of reform." After some twenty-five years his point
sank in.

The wellspring of his political ideas was his romanticism. He be-
lieved that the search for, profits had produced a society in which
comfort was mistaken for culture, and that this society was doomed.

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Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

cratic franchise. On this issue Disraeli also had strong views, and
they conflicted with the established tenets of his partv. If he had
followed in the footsteps of Wellington and Peel and opposed ex-
tending the franchise, the Tories might well have been extinguished.
Instead he persuaded them to take the initiative in reform. The un-
derlying reason why he succeeded was that their sojourn in the po-
litical wilderness had starved their allegiance to the system that had
exiled them, until they were in the same position as the Whigs of the
1820's conservatives opposed to conserving the status quo. This
was Disraeli's opportunity to convert them, but his purpose was
more than mere opportunism. He had long intended to lay the foun-
dation of the new Tory Party upon a democratic electorate.

He shared Burke's belief that the masses lacked the wisdom and
ability to govern themselves. Yet from the beginning of his career he
believed that they must eventually receive the vote and that the
Tories could and should give it to them. The explanation of this
apparent paradox is that he never considered the franchise as the
determinant of political power, and never shared the conviction,
widespread among both radicals and conservatives of his day, that
universal suffrage would be equivalent to dictatorship by the prole-
tariat. He was willing to enfranchise the masses for the very reason
that they would never, he felt, exercise a power commensurate with
their numbers.

He insisted that the Reform Bill had destroyed the old principle of
British government, that of representation without election. Before
1832, he argued, the people had been represented through the con-
stitutional trinity of Church, lords, and commons the peasantry by
the great landowning peers, the legal fraternity by the judiciary
lords, the mercantile interest by members of the House of Com-
mons, and so on. After 1832 the Church was shorn of its privileges,
the peers -were coerced into impotence, and the House of Commons
became omnipotent. Because the House was elective but did not
represent the nation, the old principle of representation without
election had been replaced by the absurdity of election without rep-
resentation. The people suffered by the change. The old aristocratic
minority had monopolized political rights on condition of guarding
what he called the civil rights of the nation the rights of all to a
modicum of social and economic security. The larger minority of the
middle class, which received political rights from the Reform Bill

247

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

to participate, if only as a critic, in the common endeavor of gov-
ernment. Disraeli made such participation a matter of principle,
which underneath its romantic trappings was the principle of Burke
that political rights have duties for their counterpart. The aware-
ness of duty, for Disraeli as for Burke, is closely associated with the
Church. The government protects the Church and controls its prop-
erty; it in turn makes governors and governed conscious of their
duty to the state. Unless both have this consciousness, administra-
tion is a mere system of police; "if government is not divine it is
nothing/* Here is the perennial Tory argument for the establish-
ment.

Another element in Disraeli's concept of the state was the Crown.
For him it was far more than a stage prop. From the moment of ac-
cession, he insisted, the monarch is in touch with the ablest states-
men, informed on the thorniest issues, and in a position to acquire
political wisdom for the service of future ministries. The sovereign's
advisory role, in consequence, is constitutionally quite as important
as the symbolic role.

Disraeli's ideas were in essence what came to be known after his
death as Tory democracy. This concept adapted conservatism to the
late-Victorian world, and the same concept, further adapted, is still
at the core of conservative thought. It is worth attention not merely
because it has affected the development of a great party for the past
ninety years. It is a brand of democracy as alien to the modern so
cialists brand as to the Victorian liberal's, and it constitutes an in-
teresting critique of both.

On the economic side Tory democracy is the antithesis of laissez-
faire liberalism, the hands-off-business school of thought. The teach-
ings of this school have the effect of subordinating the power of gov-
ernment to the power of wealth, whether in the hands of "economic
royalists" or of Whig oligarchs. The Tory democrat not only desires
to increase the security of the laboring classes but also is willing to
increase their power, on condition that they are competently led,
that power is not used selfishly, and that it is not great enough to tip-
set the balance of classes. If these conditions are fulfilled, he is far
less hostile to an energetic labor movement than the old-guard
liberal.

On the social side, Tory democracy is a denial of what Disraeli
called "that pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equal-

249

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

home from oligarchy to democracy. In this collapse of the early-
Victorian world the Tories might well have disappeared, as the first
Tory party disappeared with the collapse of the Stuart world, for
the conservative is always likely to sacrifice the claims of the future
to those of the past* Disraeli's achievement was to formulate a pro-
gram, incomplete and in many respects transient, that was neverthe-
less both radical and founded on the tradition of the party. He thus
brought Toryism to life again and gave it the vitality to survive in a
new world.

IX The Beginning of Democracy

BY the early 1860's signs of that world were appearing on every
hand. On the Continent the cult of force was gaining ground, and
Britain's influence was waning. Her diplomacy was effective in as-
sisting the unification of Italy, but thereafter she met a number of
unwonted snubs. Although Palmerston was again Prime Minister,
his power to bully seemed to have deserted him. When a Polish in-
surrection led him to lecture the Czar on the blessings of liberty, he
was politely told to mind his own business and did so. The gov-
ernment had no more than swallowed this slice of humble pie be-
fore it cut itself another. Austria and Prussia attacked the Danes
and beat them, while Britain looked on in vocal but helpless indig-
nation. When Bismarck was asked what he would do if the British
landed an expeditionary force, he answered that he would send the
police to arrest it. To this the Pax Britannica had sunk.

The external event that had the deepest effect upon British opin-
ion during this period was undoubtedly the American Civil War. A
number of factors created sympathy for the South among the ruling
class the aristocrat's picture of the Southern gentleman, the liber-
al's emphasis on minority rights, the imperialist's fear of a strong
United States, the industrialist's dependence on Southern cotton.
But the common people of Britain were largely on the other side; to
them the struggle, particularly after the Emancipation Proclama-
tion, was between popular rights and slaveholders* entrenched priv-
ilege. The focus of Northern support was Lancashire; the workers
were reduced to unemployment and misery by the Union blockade
and the resultant cotton famine, but they steadfastly supported the
Union cause. Their endurance and firmness impressed the country
and contributed to the rise of a democratic movement.

25*

Revolution by Consent, 1815-1867

Russell's administration introduced a mild reform bill. When it
was mildly amended, the Prime Minister insisted on resigning and
retiring from public life. His disappearance left Gladstone to com-
mand a divided party. On the one hand was the old guard, opposed
to any breach in the oligarchic principle. On the other was a group
of radicals led by John Bright, the orator of the Anti-Corn-Law
League who had grown into the champion of the democratic move-
ment. Between him and the right-wing Liberals no compromise was
possible; Gladstone had to throw his support to one or the other, and
he chose the radicals. The choice -was fateful. It aligned the moder-
ate bulk of the party with the progressives in a vague commitment
to the democratic principle, and future events soon made the com-
mitment more sweeping than the moderates had intended. The Lib-
eral Party, like the Tory, was slipping the anchor of tradition.

Once Russell resigned, the dissension among his followers pre-
cluded another Liberal ministry. The Tories came into office, though
scarcely into power; their titular head and Prime Minister was Lord
Derby, and Disraeli was their leader in the House of Commons. The
cabinet was at once embroiled in the issue of reform. A number of
its members were still as much averse to the idea as the old-guard
Liberals, but Disraeli saw the chance to lure his party into boldness.

After much hasty argument, and two resignations, the cabinet in-
troduced a cautious and slightly absurd reform bilL Amendments
by the opposition were welcomed, on the ostensible ground that no
measure could be passed unless it were bipartisan. Gladstone,
Bright, and their followers soon amended the original proposals
out of all recognition; the bill became far more drastic than any-
thing previously submitted by either party, and conservatives on
both sides of the House joined in opposition. Disraeli accepted the
amendments with serenity, while his followers grew increasingly
restive. But they followed, and the Gladstonian Liberals were com-
mitted to supporting a measure they had helped to shape. In Au-
gust 1867 the second Reform Bill became law. Lord Derby called it
"a leap in the dark," and Carlyle moaned that it was ^shooting Ni-
agara.'* It more than doubled the electorate, and in urban districts
gave the vote to every male householder. If this was not yet uni-
versal manhood suffrage, it was a tremendous advance toward the
goal.

The advance was not made by either party, but by a conjunction

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

when Britain's position had been relatively insecure, and they did
not share the Liberal's optimism about the Pax Britannica; they were
consequently predisposed toward imperialism and its corollary, a
strong foreign policy. During Disraeli's premiership his diplomacy,
whatever else may be said of it, did not lack vigor or imagination,
and through him the Palmerstonian technique became grafted onto
the party. This Conservative emphasis on the strong line, and the
Liberal aversion to it, go far to explain the transition from a period
of party balance to one of Conservative dominance. For by 1886 the
pressure of domestic reform was less than that of outside forces, and
the voters preferred the power politics of the Conservatives to the
detached rationalism of the Liberals.

Between 1867 and 1886 three major ministries, two of Gladstone's
and one of Disraeli's, covered the transition from mid-Victorian
calm to late-Victorian storm. The character of the period cannot be
sensed from a chronological survey, for the focus shifted bewilder-
ingly from Westminster to the Bosporus, to Dublin, to the Nile; a
better approach is to survey the main themes struggling for domi-
nance. Although they were interwoven and essentially related, in
retrospect they appear as separate topics, and topics that are of un-
equal importance. Domestic reform was the logical outgrowth of
what had already been done, and much of it was later redone in the
terms of a new age. The Irish problem, by destroying Gladstone's
party, paved the way for the rise of a new Liberalism in the twenti-
eth century. External affairs were perhaps the most significant of all,
for Britain's growing aggressiveness was not only the precursor of
her coining imperialist debauch but the symptom of a fundamental
change that has affected her policy and history from that day to this.

II Domestic Reform

THE YEARS after the second Reform Bill, like those after the first,
saw intensive remodeling. The aim was no longer to rationalize an
oligarchic society but to make ready for a democratic. Although
leadership remained with the oligarchs, their time was running out
They felt the need of preparing the masses to exercise power, and
under pressure of a widening public opinion they reassessed many
accepted institutions and traditions. For this purpose Gladstone was
ideally equipped. He was unafraid of change, even in his own think-

257

The Victorian Twilight ; 1867-1906

The reforming appetite of the Cabinet grew with eating. In 1873
the labyrinth of the central law courts was reconstructed to elimi-
nate the overlapping jurisdictions, the procedural oddities, the com-
peting staffs of judges and officials, by which the legal profession
had bewildered and impoverished its clients. Gladstone's reform, as
completed by Disraeli, produced a single court with many articu-
lated parts and a comprehensible procedure, and above it a com-
mittee of law lords acting on appeal for the House of Lords, the
nation's highest tribunal. What had been one of the most archaic ju-
dicial systems in the western world became, within a few years, one
of the most efficient.

Another simultaneous reform was the recognition of the rights of
British labor. Since 1825 the trade unions had had a dubious legal
status: they were not criminal, but they were outside the purview of
the law; their funds were unprotected against misuse by their own
officers, and they could scarcely carry out a legal and effective strike.
Their numbers and activity increased, nevertheless, and by the
186Q's they were wealthy national organizations. Their leaders real-
ized that they needed political influence to change the law, and they
agitated for the second Reform Bill; its passage projected the ques-
tion of the unions* status into the forefront of politics. By the 187(Ts
they -were strong enough to have the long-accepted doctrine of free
contract modified in their favor.

By two acts, one of Gladstone's and one of Disraeli's, the unions
acquired a privileged position. Thenceforth they might organize a
strike by all means short of intimidation and violence; freedom of
contract was converted, for them alone, into freedom to concert the
collective violation of the workers' contracts with their employer.
Unions were also financially privileged: their funds were protected
against their own officers and presumably (although on this point
the statutes were silent) against suits for damages done by their
members. These were substantial gains. The Liberals had done
much, the Conservatives more, to adjust the law to the new self-
consciousness and power of organized labor, and the demand for
further adjustment did not grow pressing until a quarter-century
later.

The cataract of reforms in Gladstone's first administration be-
came a slower stream after Disraeli succeeded him in 1874. The
Conservatives continued and in many respects sharpened the

259

The Victorian Twilight^ 1867-1906

outstanding importance was a further extension of the franchise, ac-
complished by two acts in 1884-5. The first gave the vote to virtu-
ally every male householder, rural as well as urban, and the second
divided the nation for the first time into equal electoral districts.
These measures, known collectively as the third Reform Bill, aroused
no such controversy as that of 1867, let alone of 1832, for they were
an inevitable development. The second Reform Bill had recognized
the principle of household suffrage in urban areas, which at the time
had contained the most mature elements of the laboring population.
By 1884 new conditions, particularly the increase of adequate
schooling, had broken down the distinction between industrial and
agricultural workers to the point where the principle of 1867 was
applicable to the nation at large. Application, by a change in fran-
chise and reapportionment, established at last a truly democratic
electorate.

The bill was the last major legislation that Gladstone put on the
statute book. He continued for another decade to dominate the Lib-
eral Party, and became again Prime Minister, but the great period
of his career "was ending. The reason was not in him, although he
was now in his seventies; his incredible energy and mental powers
seemed impervious to age. Part of the reason was in Europe, where
a growing chill in the diplomatic climate numbed the statecraft of
the Grand Old Man and lost him the confidence of worried voters.
But the primary reason was in Ireland. In his early years as Prime
Minister the Irish problem, more than any other, had forced him to
modify and modernize his liberalism. As the problem developed, so
did his absorption with it and his ideas about it, until he commit-
ted himself to a solution so drastic that for the better part of a gen-
eration it destroyed the hopes of his party and of Ireland.

Ill The Irish Question

THE CALM of exhaustion that had fallen over the Irish in the 1850s
began to be dissipated on the eve of the second Reform Bill. The
effect of the famine years was wearing off, and the emigrants who
had fled to the United States were agitating Ireland's cause. Many
of these men were veterans of the American Civil War, which had
given them a training in violence; the reckless among them wel-
comed a chance to fight for Irish freedom from the base of the

261

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

Gladstone grappled confidently with the task of humanizing the
law. The Irish Land Act of 1870 was intended to discourage evic-
tions, to compensate the tenant for improvements he had made, and
to facilitate his purchasing the knd to curtail, in short, the own-
er's freedom to do as he pleased with his own. The act was a signifi-
cant departure in principle from the old liberal insistence on the
rights of property, but as a remedy for Ireland it was inadequate
because it set no rent ceilings and gave no protection to tenants in
arrears. The Irish lost what little faith they had had that the agrarian
problem could be cured by legislation. Fenianism offered no solu-
tion, and they turned their attention more and more to another cure.

By the end of Gladstone's first ministry the Home Rule movement
was under way. Its leaders, unlike the Fenians, were moderate in
their objective and legal in their methods. They desired for Ireland
substantially what Canada already had, a Parliament and responsi-
ble executive controlling only internal affairs; they were convinced
that this end might be achieved without violence. Their chances
seemed slight, with both Gladstone and Disraeli opposed to them,
but events soon played into their hands. In 1878 an agricultural de-
pression struck Ireland, and grew worse with time. Because the
steamship and the newly developed American railroads now brought
to the British markets an abundance of cheap grain, Irish arable
land could no longer be cultivated at a profit and was increasingly
converted to pasture. This meant, as in sixteenth-century England,
wholesale evictions and unrest. A Land League was organized to
resist evictions. Offending agents and landlords were ostracized,
among them the Captain Boycott who gave his name to the practice*
Beasts and men were murdered, and for such crimes an Irish jury
would almost never convict. The government had either to solve the
problem itself or accept the Home Rulers* solution.

At the start of his second ministry Gladstone advanced along the
familiar lines of conciliation and coercion. On the one hand he at-
tempted a more drastic remedy for tenants* grievances: the Land
Act of 1881 made the tenant and landlord virtually co-owners, cre-
ated land courts to fix a fair rent, and forbade evictions as long
as that rent was paid; later legislation attempted to liquidate ar-
rears. On the other hand the Irish executive was given broader
powers to deal with crime and conspiracy, and the Land League

263

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

courtesy accorded debaters, every chance of amendment and point
of order, and all the techniques of filibuster to obstruct the essential
task of legislating. They did not confine themselves to bills dealing
with Ireland. Their purpose was to bring the machinery to a stand-
still, and for a time they almost succeeded.

The House was losing its old role in government. The enlarge-
ment of the franchise was making electoral campaigns and the daily
press more important than Westminster as the forum for national
debates, and the tightening of party organization inside and outside
Parliament was beginning to shift the center of power from the floor
of the House to party headquarters. ParnelTs tactics accelerated the
process by forcing the Liberals to limit debate and curtail irrele-
vant motions, and so to adopt the Disraelian principle of strength-
ening the executive's control of the legislature. The Conservatives
later continued the process, until little was left of the robust inde-
pendence that the House had so long maintained in the face of
kings and cabinets.

ParnelTs position was being strengthened by another factor.
Gladstone's failure to solve the Irish problem cost him considerable
support, and his foreign policy cost him more. The Conservatives
gained what he lost, until the balance was so delicate that neither
party could hold office without a measure of support from ParnelL
In 1885 a general election, under the terms of the third Reform
Bill, gave Gladstone a slim majority and increased the strength of
the Home Riders. They could now paralyze government by throw-
ing their votes to the Conservatives.

The crisis was at hand. The Conservatives, now under tihe guid-
ance of the Marquis of Salisbury, refused to collaborate with the
Liberals in solving the problem. Salisbury could not form a stable
ministry himself, even with Irish support, because the coalition
would be almost exactly balanced by the Liberals. Gladstone, on
the other hand, could not govern in the face of such a coalition; he
had to have Irish support He thereupon abandoned his hope of
reaching a settlement independently of Parnell, and declared for
Home Rule.

His decision may have sprung partly from opportunism, partly
from conviction that the Queen's government must continue on any
possible terms. But it was more than that. For years he had tried
whatever alternative path promised a solution for Ireland; each had

265

The Victorian Twilight , 1867-1906

brought into question the security of the home islands, and for this
reason it conflicted with the rising force of British nationalism. The
Act of Union was a known quantity; the dangers of continuing it
were measurable while those of ending it were not. It had begun as
a war measure at the time when Ireland might have become the
base for an enemy invasion; a crisis like that of 1800 might recur,
and the Irish were adept at utilizing crises. Previous concessions to
them had only played into their hands. To repeat the experiment
when they were seething with unrest, and the European skies were
darkening, seemed to the British nationalist an invitation to disaster.
Sooner or later, he felt, Home Rule would diminish Britain's power
to guard her overseas lifelines, perhaps even to defend herself at
home. He was not basically concerned with the rights and wrongs
of the Irish question. For him it did not depend, as it did for Glad-
stone, on political morality; it was determined by the old argument,
solus poputi supremo, lex.

Gladstone had been reared in an era when liberalism had been
pacific because it could afford to be. The strategic determinants of
Britain's security were largely outside his consciousness; he thought
in terms of common sense and fairness, and instinctively shunned
the amoralities of power. As a result he had begun to estrange the
nationalists within his own party by what they considered his spine-
less foreign policy, and his conversion to Home Rule turned them
into open rebels*

The most interesting Liberal malcontents were the radicals, led by
Joseph Chamberlain. This stormy petrel had entered politics as a
reforming mayor of Birmingham, and by 1880 he had risen to cabi-
net rank. His advanced social views and his intense and forceful na-
tionalism made him restive in the Liberal camp. In the general
election of 1885 he advanced a startling program, including disestab-
lishment of the Church and differential taxation of the rich; Glad-
stone could not accept it, and the Irish question completed the
breach between them. Chamberlain resigned to fight the Home Rule
Bill and was instrumental in defeating it. Thereafter he and his fol-
lowers wandered into the political no man's land.

Many right-wing Liberals also refused to follow the Prime Min-
ister. They were steeped in the Whig tradition, with its memories of
the Boyne; for all its stress on toleration Whiggism was identified
with the Protestant cause, and a self-governing, Catholic Ireland

267

The Victorian Twilight ^ 1867-1906

much as Home Rule to the disruption of his party. In the 1890*s they
became the central theme of British history.

As early as the 1860*s Europe was in the throes of a vast readjust-
ment of power. It was analogous to that produced by the rise of
France two centuries before, and it had equally powerful repercus-
sions on Britain's diplomacy and political ideas. At the same time
her military and industrial position was being weakened and her
empire exposed to the pressure of European expansion overseas.
Some of these forces of change seemed remote and irrelevant, but
in fact they were undermining the bases of the Pax Britannica and
endangering the edifice of British power. The Victorians' golden age
was drawing to a close, and this fact conditioned the statecraft of
Gladstone and Disraeli.

After 1815 the problem of Britain's security had appeared to be
solved. Her diplomats had been backed by such force that they had
been able to defend her interests by threatening rather than fighting,
and the public had assumed that her interests were permanently
safe. The Crimean War had jolted the assumption, and soon came
changes that began to invalidate it.

The most obvious change was political: the extinction of Metter-
nidbi's world in the decade after 1861. First the Kingdom of Italy
was created; then Prussia, under the guidance of Bismarck, defeated
Austria and France in turn, and in 1871 fashioned the German
states into an empire under her dominance. Simultaneously the uni-
fying force of nationalism was at work in other continents. The
American Civil War prepared the way for the phenomenal rise of
the United States as a world power, and the Japanese revolution of
1867-8 did the same for Japan. The old order in Europe was gone,
and thenceforth the new order was increasingly affected by the
weight of outside states.

The indirect effects of German unification, and to a lesser extent
of Italian, altered the framework of Britain's Continental diplo-
macy. Previously both Austria and France had been too much ab-
sorbed with their interests in central Europe, where Britain had no
vital concern, to give consistent and undivided attention to areas
where she had. By 1871 this absorption was gone. Austria, excluded
from Italy and Germany, had reconstituted herself as the Diial
Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and the emergence of Hungary im-
plied that the Hapsburg Empire was looking for its future toward

269

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

many's population and industry expanded at a phenomenal rate,
and she became the most powerful and influential state on the Con-
tinent. Not until after 1890, when Bismarck retired, did the world-
wide expansion of her power make itself acutely felt in London.

If the new Germany had at first an indirect impact on British di-
plomacy, her impact on British political thinking was at once more
subtle and more immediate. From the liberal viewpoint the German
Empire was a disturbingly successful heresy. The way in which uni-
fication had taken place and the land of nationalism it bred were as
alien and alarming to the mid-Victorian mind as the result was im-
pressive. Unification had come not from the people but from the
amoral statecraft of Bismarck and the force of the Prussian army.
German nationalism bore the Prussian imprint, and Prussianism was
essentially illiberal. It stressed the individual's duties to the state
rather than his rights and liberties. The state was organized power;
its supreme instrument was the army, through which its able-bodied
male citizens served it as their master.

When this cold Prussian creed became the vehicle for the desires
of the German people, it acquired a new force and direction. For
centuries the Germans had had no souls to call their own. Their
weak governments had been playthings of the powers, their terri-
tory open to attack, and they had learned the uses of force by being
its victims. As the last great people to achieve a nation-state they
needed to establish their self-respect by compelling others to respect
them. They had less faith in the liberal creed, with its emphasis on
rights and its dream of an international reign of law, than in Ger-
man destiny and German power to achieve it. The worship of the
state regimented the cultural and political differences that sprang
from their localism, and gave focus to the inchoate, mystical fervors
of the patriot. For him title nation tended to become identical with
tie state, the state with the government, until he believed that the
cardinal function of citizens was to obey to serve the collective
will as the one overriding imperative. Devtechland iiber attes.

This virulent form of nationalism was not a German invention. It
derived in great part from the cult of force that tinged many aspects
of the period, such as tie Napoleonic revival in France, the battle
hymns of the American Civil War, and John Bull's enthusiasm for
Palmerston. The cult also appeared in forms unconnected with na-
tionalism. The Marxian socialists were preaching the inevitability,

271

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

lyle to Bosanquet, were fascinated by German thought and dissem-
inated it in one form or another. The way was opened for their
teaching by other forces working far below the level of philosophy,
forces that were altering the framework of Europe and contributing
to a rising sense of insecurity in Britain. The more insecure the Vic-
torians felt, the more they turned to integrating and increasing their
own strength, and the more they were impressed by the German
techniques for organizing power and by the philosophy behind the
techniques. The result was that orthodox liberalism was rejected,
and the Liberal Party collapsed. Britain, once she caught the nation-
alist virus, began a breakneck race for empire.

Of the forces that opened her to contagion, three axe particularly
significant. The first was military: the changing nature of armies and
of warfare were reducing Britain's capacity to intervene in Europe,
and with it her diplomatic weight. The second was economic: Brit-
ain was ceasing to be the one great workshop of the world, and was
being forced to relearn the hard ways of competition. The third was
political: most of the great powers were setting out to partition the
globe, and Britain could not remain idle without seeing her imperial
position go the way of her industrial. These three factors are worth
examination, for they helped to convert the tolerant, progressive na-
tion of Gladstone's first ministry into the most successful exponent
of Machtpolitik in the world of the 189CTs.

In military development Germany forced the pace. Prussia had
compensated for a small population by organizing the lece en
masse of the French Revolution into a permanent peace-tune system
for conscripting the manpower of the state; the German Empire
adopted the system. France followed suit after her defeat, and soon
almost all European countries had some form of universal military
service. The Prussians had also shown that the mass army could de-
liver quick and crushing blows: the Austro-Prussiari War had been
decided within three weeks, the Franco-Prussian within seven. This
was blitzkrieg, and the prospect of its repetition forced every Con-
tinental power to be continuously prepared to put into the field its
maximum strength in the rn'' r " Tni '' rn time. Europe was beginning one
of the longest periods o peace in its history, but it was a peace of
precariously balanced forces and nervous men.

Although Britain was not directly influenced by these develop-
ments, indirectly her position was weakened. Her small professional

273

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

as a means of retaliating against foreign governments and defending
the British market. Though this movement made little headway at
the time, its appearance in business circles was a sign that Cobdenite
liberalism was no longer above question. In the world at large mer-
cantilism was reviving in the upsurge of national loyalties, and the
British were not economically strong enough to ignore the revival as
a mere error of the unenlightened.

Another form of mercantilism was also loose in the world. In the
last quarter of the nineteenth century all the great states and many
smaller ones developed a lust for territory. Africa was the principal
scene of activity. But European empires expanded simultaneously
in Asia, Japan fought China for a foothold on the Asiatic mainland,
and the United States acquired desirable remnants of the Spanish
dominions. By 1900 almost every part of the globe that was avail-
able and in any way attractive had been seized by some colonizing
power.

This 'worldwide upheaval had many causes. The new industrial
states awoke to the advantages of colonies as sources of raw materi-
als and as protected markets for capital and manufactures. The sci-
entific techniques that made large-scale industry possible advances
in public health, communication, engineering also eliminated the
obstacles of geography and climate that had hitherto kept the white
man from occupying large areas of the earth. Nationalists were fired
with the prospect of the fatherland's enhancing its prestige and in-
vigorating its soul by conquests overseas. Strategists wished to seize
territories for defense or as bases for attack* These and other fac-
tors produced an intensive race for empire such as the world had
never seen.

The Victorians had grown up during the long lull in European ex-
pansion, when theirs had been the only global empire. They were
accustomed to localized and transient conflicts of interest, with Rus-
sia here, with France there; suddenly they f ound themselves at odds
with most of the powers of Europe most of the time. For a decade
and more the public failed to realize what was going on, partly be-
cause its attention was focused on Ireland and partly because it
cherished the stubborn liberal hope that the world was moving to-
ward international order. By the 1880*8 that hope had waned so
much that Gladstone, its last great exemplar, aroused grave misgiv-
ings by his foreign policy. In the 1890*5 the British finally decided to

275

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

years immediately after the Civil War were the lowest point in
Anglo-American relations since 1814. Northern rancor against Brit-
ain, heated by the Fenians, fused with a new Imperialist spirit in
the desire for American annexation of Canada. A dispute was
needed for pretext, and the most pressing dispute was over the Ala-
bama claims. The Confederate commerce-raider Alabama had been
built in a British yard and allowed to escape by the negligence of
British officials; the United States claimed compensation for the
damage she had done, and one form of compensation unofficially
suggested was the withdrawal of Britain from the western hemi-
sphere. London at first was haughty, Washington pugnacious, and
tempers on both sides grew dangerously short.

When Gladstone fell heir to the wrangle, he applied his panacea
of negotiation. In the face of enormous difficulties, legal and psycho-
logical, the discussions continued until in 1871 they produced an
agreement for international arbitration of all the major questions at
issue between the two powers. As a result Britain was assessed for
the Alabama claims more than three million pounds. Gladstone was
hotly denounced at home for betraying the national interests, but in
fact he had served them well. The money spent was a bargain for
Britain: on the eve of her intense rivalry with the states of Europe
for empire in Asia and Africa she bought security for her empire in
America. She also began the process of reconciliation with the
United States that soon became a fixed principle of her diplomacy.
After 1871 the two nations ceased to have crises, except for minor
disputes over Venezuela at the turn of the century, and began to ad-
vance slowly but surely toward the tacit alliance of the present day.

Gladstone handled the empire as liberally as the Alabama claims,
and with as little concern for national prestige. He refused to extend
Britain's territorial commitments, despite pressure for annexations
in Africa and the Pacific. He did all in his power, conversely, to en-
courage colonial self-government, and in one case forced responsi-
bility on colonists who dreaded it. In the midst of a Maori war in
New Zealand he began to withdraw the British garrison. Thse New
Zealanders felt that they were being betrayed and farced toward in-
dependence; their alarm was echoed in the other nascent dominions,
and at home Gladstone's action was arraigned as a first step in the
breakup of the empire. Reaction quickly set in. For decades the as-
sumption had been widespread In Britain that the colonies would

The Victorian Tivilight, 1867-1906

inces they had ravaged. But he wore the blinders of Russophobia,
and so did the bulk of the British public. The fleet moved to Con-
stantinople; the reserves were called out; Indian troops were or-
dered to Malta. The pattern of 1854 was repeating itself.

At the last moment Russia gave way. Her reason was the danger
not only from Britain but also from Austria-Hungary. The Hapsburg
government had no more desire than the British to see the Balkans
dominated by Russia, and it feared that the spirit of Slavic national-
ism evoked by San Stef ano would have repercussions within its own
empire. If the Dual Monarchy elected to play the part that France
had played in the Crimean War, the Russian armies in the Balkans
might be caught between tie Austrians on the Carpathians and the
British in the Black Sea. The Czar consented to submit the terms of
San Stef ano to the consideration of a congress, and Bismarck invited
the powers to meet at the new capital of Europe.

lie Congress of Berlin was the one great gathering of the con-
cert of Europe as Europe had been redefined by the wars of unifi-
cation. But the concert was by now more myth than reality; a con-
flict, not a community, of interests had produced the congress. Most
of its business had been settled by prior negotiations between the
powers, and the resultant Treaty of Berlin rode roughshod over the
wishes of the Balkan peoples. Serbia, Montenegro, and Rumania re-
tained their independence, but none realized the hopes nourished
by San Stefano; part of Bulgaria remained autonomous, part was re-
turned to the Turk Russia acquired territory at the eastern and
western ends of the Black Sea. Austria-Hungary gained the right to
occupy and administer Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain received
from the Porte a similar right to the island of Cyprus, in return for
a guarantee to defend Asia Minor against any future Russian attack.
This was the settlement that Disraeli, on his return from Berlin,
proudly proclaimed to be **peace with honor."

It was a turning point in European history. The Balkan problem
might have been settled on the lines laid down at San Stefano; it
could not be settled on those laid down at Berlin. All the Balkan
peoples were dissatisfied, and ready to better their lot by fighting
each other or the Turk, by peddling their allegiance at Vienna or
St. Petersburg, as the hope of gain might dictate. In addition a
change in German policy, growing out of die crisis of 1878, began
gradually to develop into an Austro-Gennan drive toward the Bal-

279

The Victorian Tivilight, 1867-1906

ther provocative nor pusillanimous was quite another. Gladstone
retreated from Afghanistan, for example, only to see the Russians
begin to move in, and he was forced to stop them by almost the Dis-
raelian technique. But it was in Africa that he met his thorniest
problems, one in the Nile valley and one in the Transvaal. He in-
herited both from Disraeli, and he failed to settled either. On the
Nile he -was led against his will to an expansion of British influence
and commitments such as Disraeli had never dreamed of. In the
Transvaal, on the contrary, he practiced liberal principles, and for
all their abstract justice they unquestionably made the problem
worse.

The opening of the Suez Canal defined Britain's long-standing
concern with the eastern Mediterranean. Thereafter her general pur-
pose of safeguarding her naval power acquired a territorial focus:
she strove to prevent any other strong state from dominating, by
land or sea, the Isthmus of Suez. By an analogous process, at the
opening of the twentieth century, the strategic interests of the
United States became focused upon the Isthmus of Panama. If
American imperialism in the Caribbean was less conspicuous than
British imperialism in the Mediterranean, part of the reason was
that Britain, unlike the United States, was working within reach of
several major powers. The Bosporus and Dardanelles were one
road to Suez, Asia Minor another, and after the crisis of 1878 Brit-
ain hoped that she had barred them both. A far more direct road
was through Egypt. This nominal fief of the Ottoman Empire was in
fact a weak but independent Arab state. If its khedive kept himself
free from foreign domination, no matter how bad his rule, Britain
could remain aloof. If he came under foreign influence, or opened
the way for it by bringing his government to anarchy, Britain would
have to take the lead in intervention in order to protect Suez.

In the 1870*s Egypt was falling into confusion. The khedive of the
period, Ismail, had grandiose ideas of spending money and a child's
notion of where it came from. He borrowed recklessly from Euro-
pean financiers, and then borrowed more to pay the interest on the
loans. The effect was twofold. Egyptian bonds, marketed by the
great banking houses of Europe, created a widespread financial in-
terest in the solvency of Ismail's government. At the same time that
government was headed toward, bankruptcy and chaos, and the po-
litical implications were obviotis in Downing Street

281

The Victorian T<wilight y 1867-1906

the only native force on which the Khedive might rest his authority.
The British could not then depart without confounding the confu-
sion that had brought them.

They remained. In the next quarter-century they revolutionized
the administration, economy, and social condition of the country,
along the lines of benevolent despotism already laid down in India.
Yet Britain never acquired legal suzerainty from the Porte or formal
governing power from the Khedive, and half the revenues remained
under international control. The anomalies of her position con-
stantly embarrassed her and invited the intrigue of other states.
France was unreconciled, and did all in her power to increase the
difficulties; Bismarck bartered his consent to Egyptian reforms for
concessions to Germany elsewhere. But the British had caught the
tiger's tail; they could not let go if they would until the Egyptians
were educated to govern themselves and were secure from outside
danger. Political education was at best a long task, and security in-
volved the further problem of the Sudan.

This vast southern hinterland was an Egyptian dependency,
which Ismail had endeavored to bring under effective control. His
agent had been a devout and single-minded Scot, Charles Gordon,
whose genius was as much the saint's as the soldier's, and who
commanded phenomenal respect from the Sudanese. Gordon trusted
to his star more than to orders, and as Ismail's governor he had had
a free hand. When he left in 1879, Egyptian garrisons were scat-
tered throughout the country, and it was acquiring a semblance of
order. But at his departure his work collapsed. The tribesmen re-
belled under a leader who called himself the Mahdi, or Messiah,
and the Egyptian garrisons were soon threatened with annihilatioii.

Gladstone moved reluctantly. He was determined not to extend
and prolong Britain's hold on Egypt by occupying the Sudan; his
liberal principles could stand no more rough handling. But he rec-
ognized responsibility for the imperiled garrisons, and he was per-
suaded that Gordon was the man to evacuate them. In 1884 Gordon
returned to Khartum, the Sudanese capital, and there the Mahdi's
forces quickly surrounded him. Although the Queen and the public
clamored for a rescue, Gladstone's attention was absorbed by Ire-
land, and months were wasted before the relief expedition got un-
der way. When at last it fought its way to Khartum, in January
1885, Gordon and his men had been exterminated two days before.

283

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

those of them who looked ahead feared the Zulus more than they
disliked the British. London sent an investigator, who reported
what he wished to find and Disraeli wished to hear. In 1877 the
Transvaal was annexed, with the promise of future self-government.
The British were promptly involved in a Zulu war, and they were
roughly handled before they won it. Their prestige was at a low
ebb, and the Boers were watching with interest. Annexation had
not been popular in the Transvaal; those who had approved of it
were quick to change their minds once the Zulu menace was
removed.

Gladstone inherited a difficult situation, which he had aggravated
during his campaign by denouncing annexation as iniquitous. The
Boers concluded that he would undo it, but he gave them nothing
beyond vague promises; once in office he was too busy, as often hap-
pens, to remedy all the evils he had attacked before election. The
hotheads in the Transvaal thereupon revolted, declared a republic,
and prepared to invade Natal. The mouse, with complete self-confi-
dence, was attacking the Hon.

Gladstone immediately opened negotiations. He carried them on
during the fighting, even when the British "were sensationally de-
feated at Majuba Hill; he hated war, and he refused to admit that
the Boers had weakened the justice of their cause by winning a bat-
tle. The upshot was that they acquired independence as the South.
African Republic, which was given all the attributes of sovereignty
except control of its external relations. This action of the British
government was either the acme of enlightened liberalism or abject
surrender, depending on the point of view. In South Africa both
races accepted it as surrender. Hopes of federation were blasted,
and Boer nationalism was rekindled; the Orange Free State, which
had taken no part in the rising, thenceforth followed increasingjy
the lead of its northern neighbor. The Boers, furthermore, took the
little "war to mean that Britain would capitulate before a show of
force.

Thus Gladstone, with the highest motives, helped to lay the
powder-train for the coming explosion. He distrusted coercion like
Cromwell before him, and his policy in the Transvaal might be
summed up by "that you have by force, I look upon it as nothing."
But situations arise where the avoidance of force may be more dis-
astrous than its use. Abandonment of the Sudan and retreat in the

285

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

energy and skill he pushed a second Home Rule Bill through the
commons; when it was thrown out by the lords, he wished to ap-
peal to the country again. But his colleagues dissuaded him; the
country was tiring of Ireland and would almost surely not give him
a mandate to coerce the Upper House. In 1894 he retired for the
last time, and four years later he died. His party and the cause on
which he had staked it seemed to have died before him. He had
glimpsed the Promised Land only to have his hope betrayed; the
success that actually lay ahead was not for the Moses of Victorian
politics. Thou shalt see the land before thee; but thou shalt not go
thither unto the land/*

After the second Home Rule Bill the Liberal Unionists despaired
of reconciliation with the Liberals and closed ranks with the Tories.
The election of 1895 gave this Conservative coalition an overwhelm-
ing majority over the Liberals and Irish combined. The voters had
put a quietus on Home Rule for fifteen years to come, and had en-
dorsed an imperialism that flouted Gladstone's principles. The Afri-
can problems that had plagued him were outbidding Ireland for the
attention of the new government, which met them with a firmness
reflecting the popular mood. Now that the European powers were
scrambling for influence and territory in the Dark Continent, the
British were determined to hold their own. They could do so only
by tightening their authority and advancing their frontiers wherever
competition threatened. This stimulating and dangerous game,
which might at any time explode into war, the government played
to thunderous public applause.

The partition of Africa had begun in the early 188Q*s. Before long
the acquisitive fever had spread to Germany, in spite of Bismarck's
reluctance, and by 1895 the Germans had colonies in east and south-
west Africa; the latter, in particular, was too close to the Boer re-
publics for Britain's comfort. Far to the north the French were
pushing across the Sahara toward the upper Nile. In both the Sudan
and the Transvaal Gladstone had left unfinished business, and the
intrusion of foreign powers "was now making it more pressing: un-
less Britain settled it quickly, it might be settled for her.

The first problem the Conservatives tackled was the Sudan, where
a number of factors spurred them on. French ambitions were crys-
tallizing in an exploratory expedition from the Congo area toward
the Nile. The Mahdf s successor had decimated the Sudanese popu-

287

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

French, less understanding of the government with which they
dealt, and far less military imagination; they would capitulate to
force only after testing it.

The struggle that broke out in 1899 had been brewing more and
more patently since 1886. During those years the whole situation in
South Africa was changing. Cape Colony, Natal, and the Boer re-
publics were being dragged from their centuries of isolation into
the maelstrom of world affairs, and caught in the rush of modern
capitalism as their mineral resources began to be exploited. The
British South Africans, for the most part, were ready to move with
the times. The Boers were not; for all their willingness to utilize in-
ternational friction and to exploit the exploiters of their mineral
wealth, their aim was to maintain their political and cultural is-
land. The result was trouble with the outsiders whom they ad-
mitted and misgoverned, with the colonists and capitalists of Brit-
ish Africa, and before long with the British government. The veldt
was no longer isolated; the Boer attempt to keep it so was in one
light blind reaction, in another a gallant struggle for freedom.

The two principal factors that changed the situation after 1886
were the coming of the Germans and the inroads of modern capi-
talism. German East Africa, far to the north, was a potential base
for expansion into the hinterland and so toward the Transvaal;
German Southwest Africa bordered Cape Colony, and was sepa-
rated from the Boer states on the west only by the wilds of Bechu-
analand. The strong anti-British feeling among the Boers was wel-
come in Berlin; it embarrassed Great Britain and strengthened
German influence. By the 1890*8 that influence had a double effect It
encouraged the Boers to greater obstinacy, and it gave the British
a sense of hurry in dealing with them*

Capitalism began to overshadow the Transvaal, like the jinni re-
leased from the bottle, when gold was discovered on the Witwa-
tersrand in 1886. The Band was the richest gold field known, and
adventurers flocked to it from all over the world; the little Boer
town of Johannesburg grew in a decade from three thousand to a
hundred thousand. Boer politics and economy were turned upside
down. Farmers who had never learned to govern themselves now
had to govern a population of outsiders, or Uitlanders, who threat-
ened to outnumber them. This task alone might have baffled more
sophisticated politicians, bwt it was not alone. The Uitlanders were

289

The Victorian T'wilight^ 1867-1906

stay; while they were in his country, they must conform to his laws.
He was adamant because he felt no need to conciliate. He was crush-
ing dissent among the Boers and accumulating a store of arms and
ammunition; Dutch and German experts were beginning to develop
the resources of the country. He would soon be ready to ride rough-
shod over the Uitlanders and achieve complete independence.

At this point his policy ran head on into that of Cecil Rhodes. As
the Boer personified the old world in South Africa, the Englishman
personified the new. Rhodes had made an enormous fortune in the
diamond fields of Kimberley and augmented it from the gold of the
Rand; he was the organizing and directing genius of the South Af-
rica Company, which was chartered by the British government to
exploit and colonize the vast tract between the Transvaal and Ger-
man East Africa; he was a successful politician, and since 1890 the
Prime Minister of Cape Colony. His many projects were means to a
single end. Imperialism was his religion, and in its service he
amassed power. His methods were often unclean, for he had no
more scruples than Machiavelli; but his vision of empire had a spa-
ciousness that commands respect. He thought in vast distances, and
dreamed of Britain's dominating the whole length of Africa from
Capetown to Cairo; his sense of the map, like Chatham's, had an
epic quality. But he did not think in vast stretches of time. He was
obsessed by the brevity of all life, particularly his own, and by the
need to fulfill his mission quickly. Kruger had in him the patience
of the centuries; Rhodes was driven by the unforgiving minute.

The only sure starting point for an advance toward the Nile was
a federated South Africa. The opposition of the Boer republics still
blocked federation, and Kruger's dream of Dutch expansion was
squarely at odds with Rhodes's dream for Britain. The Englishman
resolved to surround the Boers, turn them in on themselves, and so
force them to choose between federation and stagnation. In the
decade before 1895 he had made phenomenal progress. Bechuana-
land had become a British protectorate, to keep the Germans from
linking hands with the Boers; the South Africa Company had
pushed to the northward, and in 1895 the whole area from Lake
Tanganyika to the Limpopo was brought under British control and
christened Rhodesia. The Boers were hemmed in on the west and
north, and on the east they had lost all hope of a seaport. In the
same year a railroad from Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa

291

The Victoria?! Twilight, 1867-1906

France. When the latter was settled in the spring of 1899, Chamber-
lain demanded of Kruger that the Uitlanders should be enfran-
chised after a five-year residence. The idea was reasonable, but the
demand was illegal: Gladstone had recognized the sovereignty of
the republic in internal affairs. Kruger accepted the demand, how-
ever, on condition that Britain should recognize the sovereignty of
his government for the future. Whether he intended to use that rec-
ognition to nullify the Uitlander's franchise is beside the point; for
the moment his position was unassailable in equity and law. The
British government ignored both. It raised its terms and insisted on
unconditional acceptance. Kruger thereupon withdrew his propo-
sals, and attacked.

Fortunately Gladstone was in his grave. Never in his day had
British statesmen flouted so openly his concept of morality, to the
applause of a public crazed by the goddess jingo. Britain had a
strong moral case for her concern with the Uitlanders. They were
largely British subjects, with grievances for -which the Boers were
to blame; redress was improbable except through outside pressure.
But Chamberlain's way of exerting pressure was so high-handed
that it ruined his case. The Boers came before the bar of world opin-
ion as gallant and innocent men defending their freedom, and Brit-
ain's standing sank to the lowest point in her modern history.

Her moral weakness accentuated the danger of her diplomatic po-
sition. By 1899 the three greatest powers in Europe were her ene-
mies. Russia remembered the Congress of Berlin; France had just
been humiliated at Fashoda; Germany was stubbing her toes on the
British Empire in Africa and the Far East, and was the professed
friend of the Boers. Britain's isolation exposed her to the possibility
of joint intervention, backed by widespread popular sympathy for
the Boers. The attempt to form a coalition eventually failed, partly
because the Royal Navy was still a barrier to effective action and
partly because the memory of Alsace-Lorraine was even stronger in
Paris than the memory of Fashoda. But Britain's escape left her
profoundly conscious of her isolation.

At the outset it seemed as if the Boers needed no hdip to expel
the British. The Conservative government had precipitated tbe war
without preparing for it; the garrisons of Cape Colony and Natal
were pitifully weak, and the Boers turned out to be superb soldiers.
Their offensive bogged down, however, while their wholesale an-

293

The Victorian Tivilight, 1867-1906

new era. The extinction of the republics took most of the meaning
out of the political divisions that had so long cursed South Africa;
the Boers of the veldt emerged from their isolation to become part
of the larger Dutch community, and the Uitlanders of Johannesburg
were thrown together with the British of Capetown and Durban.
The foundation was prepared for a unitary state, in which the two
peoples could continue their struggle at the polls and in Parliament
instead of by diplomacy and commandos.

Vereeniging marked a turning point for Britain as well as for
South Africa. The 1890*s, in spite of the Aubrey Beardsleys and the
Oscar Wildes, was a period of savage new gods. The worship of
force and of the militaristic state was in the ascendant; admiration
for Germany was widespread, and men as prominent as Chamber-
lain talked of a future when the Teutonic race" British, German,
and American would rule the world by strength for the world's
good. British policy reflected these ideas. It was solicitous toward
the German Empire and the United States, but other countries were
handled with a roughness that achieved more and more success
through the Fashoda crisis. The nation applauded so immoderately
that it seemed, as Kipling warned, to be "drunk with sight of
power." The culmination was the Boer War, which promised to be
both glorious and cheap. It was neither. It turned into a kind of war-
fare that not only shocked Britain's conscience but demanded hard
effort from her and her dominions. Shock and effort are sobering,
and by 1902 the imperialism of the previous decade had lost its
reckless ebullience.

The change in public mood coincided with changes on the stage
of public life. In 1901 Victoria died, and her already ageing son suc-
ceeded her as Edward VII. In her last years the Queen had played
less and less of a role in politics; but few of her subjects remem-
bered when she had not been on the throne, and her death left a
void that Edward could scarcely fill. In 1902 her most prominent
servant, the Marquis of Salisbury, retired from the premiership that
he had held with one intermission since 1886. He was the last aristo-
crat of the old school, akin to Wellington in his opposition to head-
long change at home or abroad; beside him Disraeli seemed like a
radical. Shrewd, cynical, and aloof, Salisbury was always on the
side of caution and moderation, whether in wooing the Unionists or
in grabbing the waste lands of Africa. He did not succeed in master-

295

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

organize the less skilled trades. The oligarchy of trade unionism was
broadening its base.

Another brand of socialism was at work among the intelligentsia.
The members of the Fabian Society rejected the dogmatic romanti-
cism of Marx for the slow, prosaic workings of public opinion. They
hoped eventually to see the industrial process brought under the di-
rect control of a government responsible to the mass of the people;
until that time came their function was propaganda, to spread the
idea that the socialist state was inevitable was, indeed, already in
being and to support any measure that promised to bring it to-
ward maturity. They were professed opportunists without party al-
legiance, but their bias was more toward the new conservatism
than the old liberalism. They tended to exalt government as the
medium of reform, and -were deeply impressed by Bismarck's un-
completed program of state socialism. For all their Germanic wor-
ship of the state, however, their program was thoroughly British,
and it enlisted some of the finest minds in the country, from the
Webbs to Bernard Shaw. It had no creed or eschatology, and be-
cause it was amorphous it permeated a favorite Fabian verb
the thought of intelligent labor leaders and politicians of both
parties.

The labor movement was tending for other reasons toward a Fa-
bian emphasis upon the state. Although the unions were increasing
in membership, the newly organized workers were too poor for ef-
fective strikes and hence for effective bargaining. But they had nu-
merical importance at the polls, and they stood to gain by state in-
terference; their leaders were consequently forced to be 10 some
measure socialists.

Another factor which heightened their interest in tibe state was an
offensive waged against them by the industrialists. By the 1890*5 the
employers, caught between the rising pressure of labor and of for-
eign competition, combined in large numbers to battle unionism not
only by lock-outs but also through the courts. In 1901 the House of
Lords, in its role of supreme court, handed down two decisions that
were a catastrophe for labor; one apparently outlawed tihe boycot-
ting of a recalcitrant employer, and the other made a imkm liable
for civil damages OJinrnrtted by its members during a strike. Within
a month the lords had wiped out the reading of labor law that had
prevailed for twenty years. The defeat accelerated the conversion of

297

The Victorian Twilight, 1867-1906

more than three hundred million people, bound together by ties of
self-interest and standing defiantly against the rest of the world.

His program implied enormous changes, and enormous obstacles
stood in his way. The dominions were jealous of their tariff auton-
omy because they were beginning to compete with each other and
with Britain, and several of them Canada in particular were
busy forming commercial ties with outside states; Chamberlain's
proposal would disrupt their economy. Opposition in Britain, how-
ever, was the immediate obstacle. Protection would increase prices
and diminish foreign trade; when its protagonists argued that these
sacrifices would buy Britain her security as part of the larger impe-
rial community, their argument fell on a number of deaf ears. Man-
ufacturers refused to accept it for fear of the effect on wages, mar-
kets, and profits. Trade-union leaders dared not accept it, even if
their socialism inclined them toward the principle of a state-con-
trolled economy, because the bulk of their followers refused to vote
for dearer food no matter what promises of social reforms might be
offered with it. After sixty years the ghost of the Anti-Corn Law
League was abroad, and cheap bread was again the shibboleth of
politics.

The wheel of Chamberlain's fortune had come full circle. In 1886
he had helped to ruin the Liberal Party in what he considered the
cause of imperial security. Now, in the same cause under a different
guise, he was ruining the Conservative Party. Some of the radical
imperialists followed him as imperialists; others, as radicals, refused
to tax the food of the poor and deserted to the Liberals, among them
a young scion of the House of Marlborough named Winston Church-
ill. Most of the aristocratic Tories had always distrusted Chamber-
lain, the parvenu from Birmingham, and they now washed their
hands of him. The coalition forged by Home Rule was disinte-
grating.

At the same time Chamberlain's program was uniting the Liberal
Party, which had long been torn by dissension. The right wing,
faithful to Gladstone, was still opposed to adventures abroad or at
home; many moderates, on the contrary, were ardent imperialists,
and the left wing was adumbrating a program of domestic reform
that stole the thunder both from Chamberlain and the socialists. But
one thing all Liberals had in common: the ingrained tradition of
free trade. The attack upon it brought them together, and as dis-

299

The Victorian Twilight , 1867-1906

Britain would take. The chief question before the government of
the new Kaiser, William II, was how to handle the principles of
statecraft that Bismarck had bequeathed to it. One principle was
the retention of good relations with Russia. A second was the main-
tenance of the status quo in central Europe by the Austro-German
accord, to which Italy had been added to form the Triple Alliance.
A third was moderation in dealing with Great Britain, a middle
course that utilized her isolation to wring concessions from her but
avoided provoking a final breach, A great deal depended on how
Bismarck's successors handled these three elements of his legacy*

The first was soon jettisoned for the second. Germany sided more
and more overtly with Austria in the Balkans, and the Drang nach
Osten crystallized in the project of a railroad from Berlin to Bagdad.
Russia, thus cold-shouldered, quickly took alarm and moved toward
the other friendless power of the Continent, France. After 1893 Eu-
rope was divided between the Dual Alliance of France and Russia
and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.
Britain alone remained in isolation. Although she now called it
splendid in order to make it palatable, nothing could make it safe.
The powers were impinging on her interests as they expanded over-
seas; she might handle one alone, but combinations -were another
matter.

In the closing years of the century the Dual Alliance was directed
primarily against her. France had little immediate concern with
Russia's Balkan worries, or Russia with French designs in Africa,
but both powers shared an active Anglophobia. It forced Britain
into considerable dependence on the Triple Alliance, which Berlin
was convinced she would have to join on Germany's terms. When
Salisbury's government refused to take this step and to underwrite,
in effect, German hegemony of the Continent, Berlin abandoned
moderation for a more and more patently anti-British policy, de-
signed to further German interests while coercing Britain into line.
In South Africa came the threat of joint intervention under German
aegis. In the Near East a British effort to influence the Forte was
brusquely frustrated by a conjunction of Germany, Russia, and
France. In the Far East the same three powers, intent on partition-
ing China among themselves into spheres of influence, paid little
more heed to British interests than to the rising ambition of Japan.
By collaborating with the Dual Alliance Germany was feathering

301

The Victorian Tizxlight, 1867-1906

The Germans were building with one primary aim, to gain control
of the North Sea, and could subordinate everything in a ship to its
fighting capacity in home waters; British ships might have to fight
off Singapore or the Falklands, and coal bunkers were as important
as armor. The Germans consequently had reason to hope that their
fleet would be superior in power, if not in numbers, to the part of
the Royal Navy that could be concentrated against it.

Concentration was the crux of Britain's problem. Her strategic po-
sition had hitherto been rooted in geography: her control of Euro-
pean waters had prevented Continental fleets from combining
against her or escaping into the Atlantic to attack her empire, and
no extra-European power had had a navy; she had therefore been
supreme everywhere. But by 1900 the old geography was out of
date. The United States and Japan were emerging as sea powers
weak still, to be sure, but strategically important because even a
weak fleet, operating in its own home waters, might be a match for
a strong one operating at extreme range. These infant navies threat-
ened Britain's hegemony in the western Atlantic, the Caribbean, and
the Pacific, and her problem was how to meet the threat while con-
centrating against Germany at home.

The problem was insoluble in naval terms. No cabinet would
have dared propose a building program sufficient to keep Britain
supreme in all parts of the world at once; the cost would have been
astronomical. Even keeping a safe lead over Germany, it soon ap-
peared, would strain the patience of the taxpayer. It would also re-
quire concentrating all available ships in home waters, and so weak-
ening the squadrons on foreign stations. Tar called, our navies melt
away."

To this strategic retreat Britain's diplomacy adapted itself as best
it could. In 1901 she abandoned her treaty right to participate with
the United States in building the Panama Canal, and thereby rec-
ognized the preponderant American interest in that crucial area. In
1902 she concluded her alliance with Japan, which bound the signa-
tories to join forces if either were involved in a war in the Far East
against two powers: in plainer language Britain would hold the ring
by diplomatic means if Japan fought Russia, and Japanese sea power
in return would buttress Britain's position in China. The Foreign
Office was beginning to prepare the way for a naval concentration
in the North Sea.

3<>3

The Victorian Tivilight^ 1867-1906

solved to find out. In the spring of 1905 the Kaiser landed at Tan-
gier and proclaimed himself the defender of Moroccan independ-
ence.

The moment was shrewdly chosen. For more than a year Russia,
France's ally, had been at war with Japan in the Far East, and was
losing so disastrously that revolution threatened at home; she sus-
pected that the French, furthermore, were deserting her for the Brit-
ish, and she was no more willing than able to act in the west. This
was tie German opportunity to humiliate France, break the back-
bone of the Dual Alliance, and prove to Britain that she was ill ad-
vised in her choice of friends. The ostensible German argument was
like Disraeli's after San Stefano: the Moroccan question had been
regulated a quarter-century earlier by an international conference,
and it should now be settled in congress and not by two powers
alone. To this demand Britain and France grudgingly acquiesced,
and at the beginning of 1906 the congress met at Algeciras.

If its meeting was a German victory, its outcome was a German
defeat. Morocco, except for the north coast, was virtually recog-
nized as a French sphere of influence. This result was due in large
measure to Britain's consistent support of France. As soon as Anglo-
French difficulties were settled, while Anglo-German difficulties re-
mained, Britain acquired a self-interested preference for France as
against Germany. The preference applied with particular force to
Morocco, one of the last places where Britain wished to see a strong
naval power entrench itself. Hence the Moroccan crisis, designed in
Berlin to destroy the entente, began to tighten it. Germany was left
with nothing but a Pyrrhic victory. Britain, on the other hand, took
the first step toward a new Continental policy, which has endured
until the present day.

These spectacular developments were the recognition, in diplo-
matic terms, that tibe Victorian world was giving place to another.
The disintegration of the Conservative Party and the swelling de-
mand for reform were parts of the same transition. It had set in a
generation earlier: by the 1880*s the spread of industrialism through-
out the world was imdennining British primacy, stimulating imperi-
alist rivalries on the one hand and competitive manufactures on the
other, and by the turn of the century Victorian ideas of security were
as antiquated as the Victorian social and economic structure. After

305

Georgian Britmn, 1906-1932

spending the bulk of available funds for social welfare, while the
protagonists of a strong foreign policy insisted on spending the bulk
for armaments. The two groups could not collaborate smoothly un-
less the revenues were greatly increased.

The same problem had afflicted the Conservative administration.
Tariffs had been Chamberlain's solution, and with them he might
have redeemed his promise of reform; without them the Conserva-
tive government had largely ignored reform for a strong line over-
seas. The Liberals, committed to free trade, reform, and armaments,
had no alternative to heavy direct taxation. Their budgets soon indi-
cated that they were going to kill two birds with one stone to
cover rising expenses and to redistribute the wealth of the country.
The brunt of taxation fell on unearned income and accumulated for-
tunes, to make the rich pay for ameliorating the lot of the poor. The
House of Lords was the house of the rich, and its opposition to the
Liberal program was sharpened by fear.

In 1908 the most formidable of the left-wing Liberals became
Chancellor of the Exchequer. David Lloyd George was a dynamic
Welshman with a mind as acute as any in Europe, and the tide of
reform carried him into the position where his acuteness was most
dangerous to privilege. In 1909 he introduced a revolutionary
budget. It further increased the taxes on great wealth, and "was de-
signed to break up the large estates that were still the hallmark of
the landed interest. As if to goad the peers still further, the substance
of several reforms they had already rejected was included in the bill
embodying the budget. This was far more than partisan politics. It
was class warfare against the aristocracy and its House, waged by a
government confident of its popular mandate. The peers bad helped
to precipitate the battle, and they accepted it. When the bill came
before them, they mustered the courage of desperation and threw
it out.

Courage was required because they were on shaky ground. They
had long lost their rigjat to initiate or amend a money bill, and for
almost half a century had not vetoed one; a veto would paralyze ad-
ministration. Even the hardiest peers were not ready to defy a cabi-
net supported by the voters. The Conservatives did claim, however,
that they were entitled to force the cabinet to make sure of its sup-
port. The purpose of a second chamber was to be a brake on an
overhasty House of Commons, they argued, and to prevent major

309

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

the spring of 1912 the government Introduced the third Home Rule
Bill.

For six years the Liberals had almost ignored their old commit-
ment to Ireland. They had wished to enact their domestic program
before tackling the issue that had once before destroyed their party,
and the House of Lords would never have accepted Home Rule. Un-
til 1910 the Irish had been in no position to prod the cabinet, but
thereafter they and the Labour Party held the balance of power.
The Parliament Bill could scarcely have passed the Commons with-
out their support. The Home Rule Bill was their reward, and the
curbing of the lords* veto seemed to remove the last obstacle.

The Conservatives were frantic with alarm and frustration. They
had been defeated on every major issue, and their constitutional
fortress had been sacked; they felt that the nation was being de-
stroyed by its own government. They were equally disturbed by the
danger from without. Europe was already under the shadow of a
war from which Britain had little chance of holding aloof, and the
project of Irish autonomy struck them as bordering on lunacy or
treason. They fought it as the last hope of unseating the govern-
ment before it subverted both social order and national security.

But what could they do? The lords* veto was a broken reed, and
the Liberals had the votes to force through Home Rule within two
years; legal resistance was hopeless. But an illegal method soon ap-
peared: Ulster prepared to fight. By the spring of 1914 a hundred
thousand volunteers were enrolled, a provisional government was
being organized, and officers in the British regular army among
them the chief of staff were making it clear that they would not
serve against the Ulstermen. The Conservatives fanned the flame.
They asserted that the cabinet was violating the spirit of the con-
stitution by legislating Home Rule without consulting the voters,
and a group of prominent men declared publicly that they would
hold themselves free, if the bill was passed, to take "any action that
may be effective to prevent ft being put into operation.'* This was
close to treason, and it meant that the impending civil war would
not be confined to Ireland. Ulster was ready to rebel, British Con-
servatives were ready to support rebellion, and the army was not
ready to suppress it.

Feverish negotiations got nowhere, for neither side could cona-

311

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

anxious to go further. The pacifists among them dreaded all crises,
and the imperialists wished to safeguard the empire against the ris-
ing German menace. To both groups an accord with Russia was
attractive.

The Russian government also was interested. It had recently ex-
perienced a disastrous defeat by Japan, followed by an abortive
revolution at home, 'and the Czar's ministers were convinced that
the Romanoff regime could be bolstered only by success abroad.
Their interest turned away from Manchuria and Afghanistan back
to the Balkans; there they confronted the Austro-German drive,
which began to bulk larger in their calculations than the old rivalry
with Britain. In these circumstances Anglo-Russian negotiations
were opened, and in 1907 they bore fruit in an agreement whereby
the two powers defined their respective rights and spheres of influ-
ence in Thibet, Afghanistan, and Persia. On the surface this was a
minor accord, but it had major implications.

The cardinal question it raised was about the Ottoman Empire.
After more than eighty years of a Turkish policy that precluded real
agreement with Russia, Britain suddenly came to terms with her.
The terms made no mention of the Porte, but their crucial test was
there. Did they mean that the Drang nach Osten was forcing Brit-
ain to abandon her traditional role as watchdog of the straits? If so,
the cause for which she had fought in 1854 and been ready to fight
in 1878, and the virtual protectorate she had assumed over Asia Mi-
nor, would all go by the board; the Turks would be alienated and
might be driven into dependence on Germany; Russia's Balkan am-
bitions would be encouraged at a time when they were already
threatening the peace of Europe. These were some of the potential-
ities in Anglo-Russian collaboration.

Britain had to risk them. She was even less minded to commit
herself to Russia than to France, but Russian designs no longer gov-
erned her diplomacy. German pressure in Africa, Constantinople,
the North Sea was becoming the focus of her calculations, Older
and deeper th*" her interest in the straits was her interest in pre-
venting a single power from obtaining the hegemony of Europe. To
this central concern her Foreign Office, when pressed, sacrificed
some of its firmly established concepts. The Germany of William II
was looming over the Continent like the France of Louis XIV, and
with a similar effect Britain was drawing toward France and Rus-

3*3

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

ular principle of an otherwise inert autocracy. The Serbs were the
test of her intentions. If she abandoned them, she would abandon
the Balkans and the old dream of controlling the straits; the Czar's
ministers feared that such a retreat would tear the last shred of pres-
tige from the dynasty. They were playing for high stakes. After
they lost once in the Bosnian crisis, they dared not lose again. Both
the Romanoff and Hapsburg governments, in short, were growing
desperate because each was convinced that the alternative to a Bal-
kan triumph was disintegration at home.

The attitude of Britain was far from clear. The entente had cer-
tainly not won her support for Russia in the Balkans as it had for
France in Morocco; even the Liberals had adhered to tradition in
refusing to countenance the opening of the straits. But the bases of
tradition were crumbling. The Young Turks came increasingly under
the influence of Berlin, until from the point of view of London their
empire was less a barrier against the Russians than a highway for
the Germans. If Russian influence were now eliminated from the
Balkans, the Drang nach Osten might penetrate to Suez and the Per-
sian Gulf. This was a fantastic reversal, to which Britain could not
fully accommodate her diplomacy in part because her Russophobe
traditions were too strong, but primarily because her central pur-
pose was to prevent the Balkan problem from precipitating a gen-
eral war. She consequently dared not let Russia feel confident of her
support, and at the same time dared not alienate her too far. As yet
the Anglo-Russian entente was scarcely cordial.

The annexation of Bosnia generated further crises. Italy, not to be
outdone in looting the Sultan's possessions, invaded Tripoli. While
the Ottoman Empire was thus engaged in Africa, the Balkan states
joined forces to partition its holdings in Europe. They won their
war, then fought each other over the spoils. The upshot was that
Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, the two centers of Austro-Ger-
man influence, were eclipsed in defeat, and that Serbia, Russia's pro-
tege", almost doubled her territory. The Drang nach Osten received
a serious reverse; the elated Serbs turned to thek designs on
Bosnia, and the Austrian government grew intensely alarmed. The
Balkans were a magazine with enough explosives to blow the Conti-
nent apart.

Britain might remain noncommittal, but she was within range and
could not escape an explosion. She was becoming more and more

315

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

The Liberals were determined to do all in their power to avoid
war, from which Britain had little to gain and much to lose. She had
no Balkan protege to lure her on, no Serbia to crush in self-defense,
no Alsace-Lorraine to reconquer, no ring of hostile powers denying
her a place in the sun. Her principal motive for fighting was the de-
fense of what she had, and war, particularly for a government in
the thick of domestic reforms, would be an unmitigated calamity.
Britain had two possible ways of avoiding it: to commit herself pub-
licly and explicitly to the Dual Alliance; or to retain her freedom of
action until the crisis arrived. Both courses were dangerous.

A formal commitment might deter Germany and Austria from
provoking a crisis. Again, it might not The Germans already felt
themselves blocked in Africa by British sea power, in America by
the willingness of the United States to fight for the Monroe Doc-
trine, in Asia by the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Balkans and Near
East were the only outlet left them, and they might react violently
to a fresh proof of what they called encirclement The French and
Russians, for their part, might be encouraged to greater belliger-
ence by a British guarantee. Public and Parliament at home, intent
on domestic issues, could scarcely be educated to such a complete
reversal of the isolationist tradition without a propaganda cam-
paign, which would defeat its object by heating the international at-
mosphere. For all these reasons the government dared not formal-
ize the Triple Entente.

Retaining complete freedom of action would increase Britain's
chances of mediating a crisis, but it also involved great risks for her.
One was diplomatic: uncertainty about her position might hearten
both sides to gamble on a war, as it had the Sultan and the Czar in
1853. Another and greater risk was military: because British inter-
vention could not be improvised after the outbreak of war, it had to
be concerted in advance with the French and, if possible, with the
Belgians in order to stop the expected German avalanche. Advance
military preparations were obviously inconsistent with a noncom-
mittal foreign policy. Diplomatic factors were pulling the cabinet
in one direction, strategic factors in the other.

The result was an extraordinary division of policy. While the For-
eign Office maintained Britain's freedom of action, the Admiralty
and War Office took steps that effectively bound her to France-
Anglo-French staff conversations had begun at the time of the first

317

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

a free hand. The crime shocked the Kaiser into promising full sup-
port; Russia was gripped by serious strikes, the President and Pre-
mier of France were at sea returning from a \isit to St. Petersburg,
and Britain was menaced by civil war. On July 23 the Austrian gov-
ernment delivered a two-day ultimatum to Belgrade. Its acceptance
would have eliminated Serbian independence.

This sudden assault on the peace took the chancelleries of Europe
by surprise. They woke to fevered activity. The British Foreign Sec-
retary, Sir Edward Grey, took the lead in pleading for time and me-
diation. Austria refused to wait, although Germany was by now en-
deavoring to restrain her. On the 25th Serbia, under pressure from
the Triple Entente, accepted most of the ultimatum and offered to
refer the rest to arbitration. But her soft answer failed to turn away
wrath. On the 28th she received the Austrian declaration of war.

Not even the Austrians desired a general war. They hoped that
the Austro-German combine -would again immobilize Russia as it
had done in 1908. But they were ready to take any risk in order to
destroy the Serbian threat to their empire. Germany, once she had
endorsed their gamble, surrendered the initiative to them; she could
not control them and dared not repudiate them if Russia moved.
Russia, in turn, dared not face the humiliation of being excluded
from the Balkans, for the autocracy might not survive the shock. In
response to the Austrian declaration against Serbia the Czar, after
agonizing indecision and under intense pressure from the military,
ordered general mobilization. The die was cast*

The inexorable military machine now superseded the improvisa-
tions of diplomacy. Warfare had reached die point where a short
head start in mobilization might be decisive, and no power could
wait on diplomats after its opponent had begun to mobilize. The
German ability to concentrate faster than the Russians made possi-
ble the Schlieffen Plan; if Russia meant war, the German general
staff begrudged every hour wasted on negotiation. Berlin conse-
quently resumed the initiative. On August 1 Germany declared war
on Russia, and the next day demanded of Belgium free passage for
the German armies; it was refused. On the 3rd she declared war on
France.

The British public was bewildered. But in the maelstrom of de-
velopments one fact was dear: King Albert of the Belgians had
called upon King George for help in resisting the Germans, who

319

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

Forth and the Orkneys to command the North Sea, and the First
Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had made sure that the
Grand Fleet was ready. Under its cover the regular army was trans-
ported to France quickly and without loss, and took its prepared
position on the left of the French. The allies moved into Belgium to
meet the German assault.

There rude surprises awaited them. They were not given the time
for which they had hoped because the Belgian border fortresses
crumbled. The Germans had half a million more men than expected,
and their advance was irresistible. The Belgian army was brushed
aside. The British were torn loose from their hold on the coast and
swept southward to the defense of Paris. The French line swung
down, hinging west of Metz, until it was level with Paris in the
basin of the River Marne. But its commander, General Joffre, stood
imperturbable; he massed his reserves and waited his chance. The
Germans began to outrun their communications, and their head-
quarters in Luxembourg lost touch with the unrolling battle; troops
were detached to bolster the eastern front, where the Russians, al-
though still unready, were advancing with reckless gallantry. When
Joffre launched his counterattack, the Germans were halted. They
retired and entrenched themselves, and the allies could not budge
them. Each side then tried to outflank the other, but succeeded only
in prolonging the front northward until it reached the sea in the
westernmost corner of Belgium. There the Germans tried to break
through the British army to the Channel ports of Calais and Bou-
logne. When the drive collapsed in the spring of 1915, the front be-
came stabilized in a line of trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss
frontier. Blitzkrieg had failed.

Its failure blasted the plans of both sides. The Prussian victories
of 1866 and 1870 had blinded Europe's strategists to the suggestive
deadlock of the American Civil War, and the subsequent improve-
ment of -weapons and communications had convinced them that a
quick military decision was inevitable. Kitchener, now Secretary for
War, was almost alone in his belief that the struggle might last for
three years; the public at large, and even his own department, were
sure that his idea was fantastic. It had to be. How could Europe, in
the conditions of the twentieth century, endure such a protracted or-
deal? The answer that it could not, and remain the Europe men
knew was as repellent to the soldier as to the civilian, and was in-

321

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

The nation had to replace the initial force of a hundred thousand
with armies of a million and more. For such a staggering total vol-
untary recruitment was inadequate and unwise, but it was main-
tained for a year and a half. In that time the energetic and adven-
turous in all walks of life, from the mine and factory to the country
house, went into uniform and left the home front to look after itself.
Much of the cream of Britain's manhood was skimmed off and
poured into the French and Flemish earth.

Early in 1916 the government at last succeeded in introducing ef-
fective conscription. This step was a turning point in Britain's his-
tory. For the first time she was compelled to use all her resources,
not only financial and industrial and naval power, but manpower as
well. Although the dominions gave her impressive support, it was
of secondary importance; 65% of the imperial armies came from
Great Britain, and 80S? of the casualties were hers roughly two and
a half million out of a population of less than fifty million. Since the
days of Chatham her traditional strategy had served her well, but it
no longer served. She had entered the struggle essentially because
she did not dare to stand alone; by the same token she dared not
permit her Continental allies to be overwhelmed, as they bad been
time after time in the wars against Napoleon, and she therefore had
to participate to the full in die greatest land war yet known. Con-
scription was her badge of commitment.

Tlie leaders of the government did not accept meekly the need for
pouring more and more blood into the Western Front. They were
handicapped, like any democratic administration in wartime, by the
enhanced reputation of the military; civilians rarely dare to override
the admirals and generals, who are experts with a great hold on pub-
lic confidence. Two cabinet members, nevertheless, had the courage
and imagination to interfere in the conduct of the war, and both
played major roles. One was Winston Churchill, the other Lloyd
George.

Churchill was a born strategist. By the end of 1914 he realized
that the situation in the West was a stalemate, and that it would
take hundreds of thousands of casualties to drive home the truth to
the generals. He saw two possible solutions, either to by-pass the
Western Front by attacking elsewhere or to find new tactical meth-
ods for breaking the stalemate. His restless mind explored both

323

Georgia?2 Britain, 190(5-1932

then the opportunity was wasted because it had not been foreseen.
Exploitation of the new weapon demanded mass production, a dif-
ferent system of tactics, and re-education of the high command,
requirements that had not been fully met by the time the fighting
ended. Yet tie tank was the one great tactical innovation of the war,
because it restored the possibility of surprise and maneuver. The
Germans grasped this possibility, and in the next twenty years they
built a new kind of warf are upon it. Churchill in 1940 had cause to
regret the weapon he had fathered in 1915.

His resignation, under the cloud of the Dardanelles disaster, left
Lloyd George as the most forceful figure in the cabinet. The fiery
Welshman was less disposed to direct interference with the military,
but he was beginning to realize how much they underestimated the
magnitude of their problem. In the spring of 1915 he became Min-
ister of Munitions and set himself to remedy the desperate shortage
of supplies, particularly of shells, that faced the army in France. His
task 'was staggering. British industry was wholly unprepared for the
demands upon it; the French were of little immediate help because
the bulk of their manufacturing plant, most of their coal, and prac-
tically all their iron mines were in German hands; the munitions
output of the United States grew slowly. Lloyd George performed
prodigies, however, and he was assisted by a tightening of govern-
mental control over labor and management such as even socialists
had not thought possible. By 1916 he had weathered the worst of the
crisis.

He "was then involved in a political crisis. Soon after the begin-
ning of the war the Conservatives had forced their way into the gov-
ernment, but the coalition cabinet was unwieldy. Control of the war
effort devolved upon a small committee in which Lloyd George was
the real force, and at the end of 1916 he became Prime Minister. The
executive was immediately reorganized. The committee became a
cabinet of five, with whom final decisions rested; most department
heads were relegated to subordinate rank as ministers. Under this
centralized authority, animated by the ferocious energy of the Pre-
mier, the nation was regimented as never before and responded with

a will.

The most important aspect of the stalemate on land, from the
British viewpoint, was that it brought sea power into its own. Until
late in the war Britain's advantage of mobility was little used, ex-

3*5

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

The climax came in April with a virtual American ultimatum, to
which Germany responded with a conditional promise to safeguard
noncombatants; for some months her campaign slackened. The rea-
son was a change not of heart but of strategy. She was at last ready
to use her battle fleet, and needed her submarines to support it.

She had paid a heavy price for her dreadnaughts. They had di-
verted money, men, and effort from the army, and they had been
the greatest single factor in alienating Britain. The High Seas Fleet
was far stronger than necessary to control the Baltic, and its only
justification was to live up to its name to bid for control of the
North Sea. But for a year and a half it had played hide-and-seek
with the British, and the few surface engagements had been at most
drawn battles. In the spring of 1916 came a change of policy, pro-
duced by the stalemate on land and the growing pressure of block-
ade, the deterioration of civilian morale, the American protests at
the U-boat campaign, and the promotion of a fighting admiral,
Scheer, to command of the fleet. Scheer did not intend to engage
the whole British fleet. He hoped to lure it out from its bases into
ambuscades of submarines, and use his surface force to overwhelm
a detachment before the remainder could arrive in support. If he
succeeded, he might eliminate the British superiority in numbers
a ratio of roughly eight to five and fight thereafter on equal terms.

At the end of May 1916 the entire High Seas Fleet ventured from
port. It encountered the British advance guard under Admiral
Beatty off the peninsula of Jutland; when Beatty was lured into
contact with the main German line, Scheer was on the verge of the
triumph he had planned. Suddenly, steaming to the rescue out of
the mist, came the whole force of the British Grand Fleet under
Admiral Jellicoe. The battle that ensued was unique both in scale
and confusion. The contestants were shrouded first in fog, then in
darkness, and their actions have since been shrouded in contro-
versy. But certain facts are clear. Although the Germans were
heavily outnumbered, Jellicoe refused to press his advantage in the
face of the destroyer attacks with which they covered their retire-
ment; the effectiveness of the torpedo was still unknown, and he
dared not risk his battleships. The Germans fought brilliantly, and
escaped in the night. Their ships proved almost unsinkable, their
losses were only a fraction of those they inflicted, and with reason
they claimed the victory. But they never repeated their experiment.

327

Georgia?! Eritd?i y 1906-1932

macht oder Niedergang, and this developed frenzy was as shocking
to the United States of the New Freedom as its earlier phase had
been to Gladstonian Britain. No subtlety of German propaganda,
furthermore, could disguise the fact that the Kaiser's armies had in-
vaded the West, or that his submarines were actively murdering
noncombatants, allied and neutral, while Britain was merely wait-
ing for an enemy populace to starve. German ideas and conduct, in
short, gave power to allied propaganda.

The economic explanation is less superficial but equally inade-
quate. American industrialists and bankers unquestionably had a
stake in allied victory, for the British and French governments were
their best customers. The stake was not acquired by choice, however;
it was the product of British sea power. The control of the Atlantic
by the Royal Navy kept the American markets open to one set of
belligerents and closed to the other. The United States, in conse-
quence, developed an economic interest in the cause of the allies.

Yet this was not her basic interest. The factors that created it
created also a military involvement; the German submarine offen-
sive was a threat not merely to her prosperity but to her security.
She had grown, like the dominions, within the framework of the
Pax Britannica, and had been able to afford isolation because the
Royal Navy had been her buffer against European powers. At
the opening of this century the British concentration on the North
Sea had preforce stimulated American naval development: by 1914
the United States fleet had become superior to all others except the
British, and the building program of 1916 envisaged equality with
Britain. One major reason for this sudden expansion was the situa-
tion in Europe, where the submarine offensive threatened to destroy
Great Britain. British sea power was a known and predictable force,
which even in the imperialist orgy of the 1890*s had not seriously
threatened the United States. German sea power was another matter.
If it became dominant in European waters, the United States would
be confronted by a triumphant nation whose ill will she had richly
earned by her aid to the allies, and whose ambition for WeTtmacht
was all too clear. By 1917 American security depended on Britain's
survival, much as Britain's security by 1914 had depended on the
survival of France.

President Wilson virtually ignored this factor of self-interest. His
initial emphasis on international law and the freedom of the seas

3*9

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

U-boats brought down the rate of loss, and by the spring of 1918
Germany's great gamble had patently failed.

Only one more chance remained to her. She was slowly but surely
starving for raw materials and foodstuffs. The leaks in the blockade
were plugged now that the American government had forgotten its
solicitude about freedom of the seas, and the European maritime
neutrals were rationed to pre-war quotas of imports; the territories
that Germany had gained at Brest-Litovsk were too badly devastated
to be of immediate use in feeding her. But her triumph in the East
freed her armies, for the first time since the Marne, to concentrate
against the West. Time was pressing. Her submarines could no
longer hope to impede the flow of troops setting in across the At-
lantic, and she had to strike before the Americans reached France
in decisive force.

In the spring of 1918 the blow fell. The British were driven to the
gates of Amiens, the French once more to the Marne, and the allied
line was stretched to the breaking point. But it held, thanks in part
to the Americans, who for the first time were heavily engaged. The
gravity of the crisis frightened the allies into agreeing, after three
and a half years, on a single commander in chief, and by summer
Marshal Foch was ready to launch his counterattack. He had ex-
pended his French and British reserves in stemming the German
tide, but he now had almost a million Americans and an ample sup-
ply of tanks. As he struck now here, now there, the enemy gave
ground. German morale at the front and at home was disintegrating
fast.

Simultaneously allied offensives exploded on other fronts. The
Italians swept the Austrians back toward the Brenner Pass, while in
the Balkans a Franco-British force advanced against the other flank
of tie Hapsburg Empire; British troops operating from Egypt over-
ran Palestine with Arab assistance, and an Anglo-Indian army moved
northward through Mesopotamia. The Central Powers were at the
end of their tether, without supplies or hope. In October the Turks
surrendered, and the Dual Monarchy disintegrated in nationalist
revolutions. By November the German army and navy were mu-
tinous; the Kaiser fled to Holland, and a provisional republican gov-
ernment signed an armistice with the allies. The Hohenzollern and
Hapsburg regimes had gone the way of the Romanoff, through de-
feat to revolution.

331

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

Paris his reputation probably stood higher than that of any man
in modern history. His diplomacy had been gravely impaired, how-
ever, by the defeat of his party in the congressional elections of
1918; no one knew whether the American people would endorse or
repudiate his work at Paris. Lloyd George's position was both
stronger and less detached. At the close of hostilities he had fought
and won a general election. On issues of immediate concern to the
voters, such as German colonies and reparations, he fulfilled the
election promise "to squeeze the orange till the pips squeak," but
on territorial issues in Europe he held out for moderation. He
realized that Britain's interests demanded, as in 1815, quick eco-
nomic recovery on the Continent in order to re-establish markets,
and he was as firmly opposed as Wilson to creating what he called
new Alsace-Lorraines areas lost but never forgotten by the van-
quished. He therefore worked for a settlement that would leave
Germany, in particular, economically and politically viable.

This British attitude, largely shared by the Americans, seemed
quixotic to the French. They were more obsessed than their allies
with the German menace, and approached it with the realism not
of the economist or statesman but of the strategist. From their view-
point the arguments for a convalescent Germany, and against arous-
ing the German will to revenge, were as nothing beside the need
for French military security. "They were thinking in the language of
terrain, of army corps, of industrial potentials for war, a language
that history had not taught the Anglo-Saxon powers. Disagreement
among the victors was implicit in their backgrounds, and no peace
conference could reconcile it.

The settlement begun at the conference table took longer to -work
out than the war had taken to fight. Not until 1925 was the peace-
making substantially complete. It was far more than the Peace of
Paris, the name often given to the Treaty of Versailles with Ger-
many and the concomitant treaties with other vanquished states.
Some major issues, particularly in eastern Europe, were scarcely
touched at Paris; others could not be settled there because the am-
bitions of the victors clashed; still others were settled only to be
modified by the resistance of the vanquished. But the settlement as
a whole was more important for the future than its chronological
development. Three of its aspects were of particular concern to
Britain: the terms imposed upon the vanquished, the great experi-

333

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

were safe only as long as the settlement was maintained inviolate.
Once a predatory power arose on either side of them, they were its
predestined victims.

This structural weakness of the peace was accentuated by another
factor. Three major states were determined to revise the settlement
when the chance arose. The first and least of the three was Italy.
She had entered the war after deliberate bargaining, and came to
the peace table to raise her terms and secure dominance of the
Adriatic. When her hope was blocked, many Italians felt that the
fruits of victory had been filched from them because they lacked
the strength to assert themselves. They began to long for a leader
who would make Italy into the great power she patently was not.

A far more important revisionist state was Russia. Her former
allies were embittered by her wartime desertion and alarmed by
communism; they interfered in the civil wars against her regime,
and treated her as an international pariah. She was excluded from
Europe more thoroughly than at any time since the eighteenth cen-
tury; the cordon of new states, many of them created wholly or in
part out of her former territory, now sealed her off from the West.
The communists accepted the losses partly from weakness, partly
from a revulsion against imperialism and a hope that immediate
world revolution would make all frontiers meaningless. But as the
hope faded with time, the settlement took on the aspect of another
Brest-Litovsk. The force of Russian patriotism was fused with com-
munist aversion to the states upholding the settlement, and the fu-
sion generated that distrust of the West that is today one of the
greatest threats to world security.

The most obvious revisionist power was Germany. In the West
she was forbidden to fortify or maintain troops in the Rhineland,
and was obligated to support the allied armies of occupation for
years to come; she ceded Alsace-Lorraine to France and sustained
minor losses elsewhere. In the East she had the greatest blow to her
pride: the surrender of Danzig and the Polish Corridor cut her off
from East Prussia, the province as dear to German patriots as Vir-
ginia to American. Overseas she lost everything in China and the
north Pacific primarily to Japan, elsewhere to Great Britain and the
dominions as mandatories under the League of Nations. Her fleet
and army were reduced to police forces. She admitted her guilt for
the war, and agreed to pay an indeterminate sum in reparations.

335

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

conviction that a military instrument for repressing aggression
would repress progress as well.

To the French the Anglo-American scheme was inadequate in its
structure and quixotic in its premise. They fought it at Paris, but on
point after point they were forced to give way. The League defined
in the treaty was a far cry from the instrument of security for which
they had hoped. Members were precluded from going to war, it is
true, until an elaborate machinery of mediation had been tried and
found wanting; any state that violated this obligation risked boycott
and whatever military sanctions the League Council might recom-
mend and the national governments be willing to provide. But such
sanctions were not guarantees in the French sense. They depended
upon the will of sovereign states, and they were meaningless if the
will were lacking.

If the commitments of the covenant were too little for France,
they were too much for the United States. The American isolationist
tradition was younger than the British, but deeper, as the Atlantic
is deeper than the Channel, and it seemed to be founded on geo-
graphic and strategic immutables. The United States had gone into
the war on a wave of emotion. Emotion was a volatile substitute for
insight, and evaporated quickly when Wilson was forced at Paris to
compromise with his proclaimed principles. The defects of the peace
and of a League that would tie the United States to surveillance of
the peace were denounced by the Republicans with mounting ran-
cor. Their triumph in the election of 1920 began the American re-
pudiation of the treaty and the covenant.

The effect was shattering. The League was based upon Anglo-
American concepts unfamiliar to much of Continental Europe; they
had been embodied in the covenant primarily at Wilson's insistence,
and his defeat at home weakened the standing of his ideas abroad.
The machinery for maintaining peace, furthermore, was designed
for the motive force of agreement among the major states; the small
ones could and did contribute enormously to the work of the
League, but the great ones determined, by their unanimity or lack
of it, the crucial question of whether the machinery would work to
halt aggression. The withdrawal of the United States destroyed aH
chance of unanimity. It also widened the disagreement between
Britain and France, the two principal powers that remained com-
mitted to the settlement.

339

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

land and the Franco-German border, and promised military action
to prevent revision by force. Britain refused to be involved with
Germany's eastern frontiers, but in the West she f ormally committed
herself to war if the status quo were attacked. Eleven years kter
her commitment proved to be a scrap of paper.

Outside Europe Britain was left by the war with two outstanding
problems in foreign relations, and both had to do with the United
States. The first was financial. American loans had been a major
factor in financing the war; Britain had been the chief borrower,
and she in turn had lent to her allies. After Versailles the debtor
states hoped to obtain from German reparations the wherewithal
for payment. When reparations yielded only a fraction of the sums
expected, Britain was caught; her Continental debtors could not re-
imburse her, yet the United States insisted on being reimbursed
by her. The burden fell on the British taxpayers, who felt that the
Shakespearean plot was being reversed: after they had paid for the
war with their blood, "Uncle Shylock" was requiring the pound of
flesh. Anglo-American relations were embittered for a decade and
more, until in 1932 debts and reparations alike were forgotten in
the worldwide economic crisis.

Britain's other problem with the United States was naval. By the
end of the war the American building program of 1916 was bearing
fruit. The primary cause of the program was the altered American
position in the Pacific: the war had shown that the effective opera-
tional range of a fleet -was steadily decreasing, and the security of
outlying American possessions was decreasing with it. Manila was
much closer to Japan than to Pearl Harbor; the Japanese had also
outflanked the Philippines by seizing the German holdings in the
Carolines and Marianas and retaining them under the euphemism
of mandates. In the shadow of these developments American naval
authorities pressed for further expansion.

The British were uneasy. The United States had just fled like a
frightened bull from the European china shop, but she was now
building a great fleet. Why? She had none of the traditional incen-
tives, such as a huge merchant marine, a worldwide empire, or a
position exposed like the British to overseas attack. The situation in
the Far East looked far less menacing from London than from Wash-
ington; the Anglo-Japanese alliance was still in force, and to the
British the yellow peril seemed like the yellow convenience. Ameri-

341

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

VI The British Commonwealth

IN the period 1918-32 two other developments growing out of the
war concerned Britain even more immediately than the international
settlement. One was a readjustment of imperial relations that cul-
minated in the legal entity and logical anomaly known as the British
Commonwealth of Nations. The other was the evolution of a new
political and social order in Great Britain herself. These two devel-
opments were part of a single process whereby the British peoples,
at home and overseas, sought to adapt themselves to the conditions
of an altered world.

The birth of the Commonwealth can best be understood by a
backward glance into the nineteenth century. The years between
1867 and 1914 were the formative period during which the domin-
ions expanded rapidly. But the process was not marked, except in
South Africa, by sensational events. Canada steadily gained cohe-
sion, as wheat brought immigration to the prairie provinces and the
Canadian Pacific Railway tied them to the coasts. In Australia the
states grew together around the periphery of a central desert, and
in 1900 they were federated in a single commonwealth. Remote
New Zealand embarked on a program of state socialism, which at-
tracted worldwide attention and provided an object lesson for pre-
war British Liberals. In South Africa the same Liberals had the
courage to give the defeated Boers responsible government, and
then in 1910 to permit the four colonies to join in a unitary state.
Union did not end the old troubles, for the Boers themselves were
divided between the nationalists, who remained true to the spirit of
Kruger, and the moderates, who advocated reconciliation of the
white races, a large measure of collaboration within the empire, and
a less primitive native policy. The struggle between these two
groups, one entrenched among the back-veldt farmers and the other
in fluctuating alliance with the British minority, did much to keep
the Union the most isolated and self-absorbed of all the dominions.

The first World War began a period of rapid growth in the do-
minions* self-consciousness and sense of interdependence. The war
proved what the Boer War had suggested, that they were ready to
support the mother country to the limit of their capacities. They
provided money, ships, and men; the Canadians distinguished them-
selves in France, the Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli,

343

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

a solution that Las endured in essence until the present day The
outbreak of hostilities in Europe postponed hostilities in Ireland
only for a time. Home Rule was enacted, but its immediate suspen-
sion ensured the renewal of agitation. Extremists soon began to su-
persede the Home Rulers, as they had been threatening to do since
the days of Parnell. TTiey called themselves Sinn Fein, "Ourselves
Alone/' and argued that Ireland must seize her opportunity to win
complete independence while British power was mired in France
In 1916, with feeble assistance from Germany and from fellow-
extremists in the United States, they attempted a rebellion. The
British suppressed it and executed many of its leaders, who acquired
as martyrs far more influence than they had had when alive. The
attempt to introduce conscription into Ireland won further support
for the Sinn Feiners; by the end of the war they were strong enough
to convene an assembly at Dublin and proclaim an Irish republic.
Its president was a Spanish-American-Irish veteran of the rebellion,
Eamon de Valera.

The third Home Rule Bill was by now as dead as its predecessors.
It was too much for Ulster and too little for the rest of Ireland.
Parliament, in desperation, passed a fourth bill, which for the first
time separated the north from the south. Each was to have repre-
sentation at Westminster and a parliament for internal affairs. Ul-
ster accepted this solution and is still governed by it Southern Ire-
land rejected it, both because it fell short of independence and
because it partitioned the island. A year of ugly civil war ensued, the
war that had threatened in 1914. But the mood of the British public
had changed; Conservatives and Liberals were no longer at daggers
drawn, and the nation craved peace. Lloyd George opened negotia-
tions with the Sinn Fein government, and in 1921 conduded a treaty
that established the Irish Free State as fully autonomous; Britain
withdrew from all but a few naval bases. This concession was inade-
quate for de Valera and other extremists, who spurned aH connecs
tion with the empire, but by 1928 the government of the Free State
succeeded in establishing its authority. Southern Ireland took her
place as a fifth dominion, with entire control of her own affairs and
only a nominal allegiance to the British Crown.

For more than three hundred years the bond between Britain
and Ireland had galled the tempers of both. The British had tried a
number of experiments to make endurable a tie they dared not

345

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

part by dominion pressure. She was tired. The war had skimmed
the cream of her manpower, disrupted her economy and markets,
forced her to liquidate much of her foreign investment, and saddled
her with an astronomical public debt. During the struggle Japanese
and American industry had thrived, and even in India native manu-
factures were competing with British. By the 1920*s Britain's eco-
nomic sinews were no longer strong enough to hold the empire
together. Her imperial position was further weakened by her with-
drawal from all but a foothold in Ireland, and even more by the
ending of her naval predominance; she now had to trust, as a sar-
donic observer put it, to "faith, hope, and parity." These changes
largely dissipated her imperialism of the previous generation. She
began to adjust herself subconsciously to a recession of power, and
the Statute of Westminster was a symptom of adjustment.

VII Domestic Change

THE PRESSURE of a multitude of problems was simultaneously
forcing Britain toward a new order of society at home. The core of
these problems was economic, and continued to be for a decade.
British markets did not recover sufficiently to compensate for the
ending of war production; by 1929 the volume of shipbuilding and of
coal, iron, and textile exports the old marrow of the national econ-
omy was markedly below that of 1913. The basic cause was not the
war. Britain depended on foreign consumers; the spread of indus-
trialization throughout the world and the effect of improved tech-
niques in increasing the worker's productivity were cutting down
the foreign demand for her goods. Her halcyon days had ended.
By the early 1920*s depression was endemic in the old industrial
centers, and particularly in the mining areas of Wales and north-
eastern England. The unemployment figures, rising steadily and
ominously, represented the central problem that faced successive
ministries, and against which none prevailed.

In 1922 the wartime coalition dissolved. Lloyd George's handling
of the Irish question, in particular, cost him tibe support of the Con-
servatives. They ousted him, and for two years they tried to remedy
the nation s economic flls. Without a blush they followed the lines
laid down by the pre-war Liberals in unemployment insurance and
differential taxation of the rich; they attempted to encourage the

347

Georgian Britain, 1905-1932

but they looked to tariffs as well as to direct taxation for financing
the social services rendered by the government. Labour spoke of a
capital levy, and opposed tariffs in general and particularly any
tariff on foodstuffs. The pull of these opposing programs gradually
broke the Liberal Party in two. Most of its less radical members
were absorbed by the Conservatives; its left wing, which had stead-
ily advocated greater socialization, gravitated inevitably toward
Labour. Liberalism, the fighting faith of a decade before, was now
a compromise deserted by all but Lloyd George and a handful of
his followers.

Thus the 1920's, like the 1880's and the 1840's, witnessed the
schism of a great party. This time each wing, instead of only one,
had another party to absorb it, and schism meant virtual extinction.
In the short run the Conservatives were the principal gainers. They
acquired men of caliber and ideas, notable among them Winston
Churchill, and strengthened their hold on the electorate; in time of
deepening crisis the voters trusted more and more to the veteran
party, and for the next twenty years, with one brief exception, it
played the major role in government. The Conservatives probably
gained less in the long run, however, than their opponents. Labour
had always been in danger of becoming what its name implies, the
party of a single class. As long as socialists in other classes, the heirs
of the Fabians, looked to Liberalism for the realization of their
hopes, Labour remained too much under trade-union influence to
have a broad appeal for the public at large. Once it acquired the
left-wing Liberals, however, it began to grow toward its present
stature, a socialist party with a national program and a national
base, as open to an Atdee or a Cripps as to a Bevin or a Bevan. Its
growth was delayed by hard times and dissensions within the ranks,
but led eventually to the triumph of 1945.

In the 1920*s such triumph seemed remote. When the sickness of
the coal industry became acute in 1926, the trade unions tried to
show their power and force a restoration of wage cuts by means of
a general strike. The nation rallied behind the Conservative govern-
ment; serious violence was averted partly by the British sense of
order and partly, as in the days of the chartists, by a display of mil-
itary force. The strike collapsed, and the unions subsequently modi-
fied their tone. They largely calmed the fears of the country, and the
Labour program, trimmed of its most controversial plans, seemed

349

Georgian Britain y 1906-1932

creasing commensurately dominion tariffs on her goods scarcely
the way back to her Victorian prosperity. She was no longer the
magnet for the Commonwealth. Canadian trade with the United
States, and Australian with Japan, subsequently grew faster than
that of either dominion with the mother country. The Ottawa ex-
periment revealed the self-assertiveness of the dominions, the
changed economic position of Great Britain, and the allure of her
competitors.

The period between the first World War and 1932, in summary,
was one of epochal changes in Britain's domestic and imperial posi-
tion. They brought home to her the fact that the days of her pre-
dominance were gone. The Liberal Party, for all its metamorphosis,
died soon after the era of free enterprise in which liberalism had
matured, and the passing of that era was equally manifest in the
curve of unemployment, the abandonment of gold, and the flight
from free trade. The Washington naval treaties, although their full
significance was not recognized until later, revealed a striking re-
cession in British $ea power. Within the Commonwealth Britain ad-
mitted a declining role by recognizing the Irish Free State and the
diplomatic independence of the dominions, and the terms she made
at Ottawa underlined the admission. She was beating a strategic re-
treat on many fronts.

The post-war years had thus been for her a period of self-absorbed
adjustment to straitened circumstances. By 1932 the worst of the ad-
justment was over, but it had left its mark. She was turned in on
herself, her confidence weakened by the mood of retreat, just when
a wholly different problem was arising. After 1932 the focus of her
destiny shifted once more to Europe, and the shift demanded a
commensurate shift in her outlook. Before she had time to achieve
it, she was on the brink of destruction.

35*

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

tories and populated by unemployables. The nation was faced by
a shift of labor, like that of the eighteenth century in reverse, and
the resultant problems of poor relief once more weighed heavily on
government and taxpayers.

The nation was also undergoing social readjustment. Until 1914
the old oligarchy, for all the swelling of its ranks and the curtail-
ment of its power, had retained a privileged position; land and the
country house had still been the hallmarks of a ruling class. But
for the landed interest, in particular, the taxation of the war and
post-war years had been calamitous. By the 1930*s surtaxes and
death duties were absorbing the wealth upon which country estates
depended, and many of them were sold to nouveaux riches, or
turned into schools, or donated to the National Trust as monuments
of a vanishing past. In business and even in government the sons of
the gentry were competing on almost equal terms with the gradu-
ates of board schools and provincial universities. Land was losing its
political character; it was no longer a hallmark but merely an un-
profitable form of investment.

The upper ranks of society had always been rooted in the land.
Now that their roots were withering, they were profoundly uneasy.
At the same time they had what may prove to have been their last
opportunity to lead the country, for the disintegration of Labour
soon gave them control of the National Government. They led with
ebbing self-confidence, afraid of communism at home, of the strong
line abroad, of anything that might accelerate their own decline.
Their residual courage scarcely appeared until 1940, when class in-
terest gave place to national survival.

The Conservative leaders had another characteristic. They were
not only anxious but elderly. With the single exception of Anthony
Eden, who resigned early in 1938, the makers of British policy were
too old to have seen active service in the war. The slaughter on the
Western Front had left a gap in the sequence of rising leaders; men
who might now have been invigorating public Me had been dead
for twenty years. In their stead were ageing, worried politicians,
who looked behind them and around them but rarely dared to look

ahead.

The state of politics during the period gave little stimulus to fore-
sight. The Labour Party adhered to the doctrinaire, pacific interna-
tionalism of the socialist creed Its leaders trusted to the League as

353

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

increasing, and a legal symbol is difficult if it comes to life. Ed-
ward s first step as sovereign was to claim sovereignty over his pri-
vate life. His insistence on marrying a divorcee roused against him
the latent power of the bishops and the nonconformist conscience
and the cabinet demanded, in effect, that he either admit himself
the tool of government or abdicate. He chose to sacrifice his posi-
tion to his individuality. When he was succeeded by his brother, as
George VI, the long process of protecting the crown from the per-
sonality of its wearer reached its final stage. But the events leading
to the abdication had coincided with a crisis abroad, and the excite-
ment aroused by King Edward had helped to mask appalling blun-
ders in British diplomacy.

In these years Ireland was also a distraction. In 1932 de Valera
had been voted to power in the Free State. He broke the remaining
ties with Britain and created an independent republic, Eire, which
retained the Crown only in external affairs as a symbol of co-opera-
tion with the Commonwealth; he thereby carried the freedom legal-
ized in the Statute of Westminster to the point of virtual secession,
which in 1949 became complete secession. De Valera's government
was soon involved in a tariff war with Britain, which was resolved
in 1938; as part of the settlement Britain agreed to evacuate the
three Irish bases reserved to her by the treaty of 1921. This with-
drawal was bitterly opposed by Churchill. He represented the im-
perialism that for fifty years had fought concessions to the Irish as
dangers to Britain's security, and his argument was cogent The
bases were invaluable for sea and air patrol in the event of war, and
their loss greatly curtailed the patrolling range. (Britain and the
United States soon paid the price in lives.) But Churchill stood
alone. Britain -was retreating before Eire as she had retreated else-
where, in the illusion that retreat was the road to peace.

These domestic factors underlying her myopia were not the sole
cause of it. Before 1914 her government had reconciled a far graver
domestic situation with a foreign policy that was certainly not my-
opic; in the 1930's, it seems clear, her difficulty was only in part her
self -absorption. In equal part it was her inability to see the foreign
crisis for what it was. Its dangers were too unfamiliar to be grasped
either by the government or the nation. They were easier to mini-
mize than comprehend, and they were largely dismissed for more
palpable concerns.

355

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

Kremlin assumed that the capitalist democracies wished to destroy
Russia in self-defense, and that she was therefore as much at war
with them as with the dictatorships; any duplicity was justified, in
consequence, if it benefited her or the communist cause. Such an at-
titude was no more comprehensible in London than that of Hitler
or Mussolini.

Even during the depression communism made little headway in
Britain. Although the social climate was changing, class distinctions
were still as much in the fibre of the British workingman as of the
aristocrat; the missionaries of Lenin, like the missionaries of Marx
before them, could not remold the British sense of humor and of
compromise, even among the unemployed, into the stuff of revolu-
tion. But they did succeed in alarming the upper classes. The com-
munist bogey assumed much the same role for the Conservatives
that the Jacobin bogey had once played for earlier Tories. The effect,
as Conservatives came to dominate the government, was to make
still fainter the chance of Anglo-Russian collaboration.

On that chance hinged the peace of Europe, for only a revival of
the Triple Entente could possibly create the force to contain Ger-
man expansion. In 1935 France and Russia reverted to the precedent
of forty years before and concluded a defensive alliance. It had lit-
tle vitality, but it disturbed Great Britain. Her distrust of Russia had
endured for a century, her experiment in co-operation for only the
decade after 1907, and she now had more than the fear of commu-
nism to dissuade her from repeating the experiment. A revived Triple
Entente might not only encourage communist activities throughout
the Continent but precipitate a German attack; it would certainly
expose the French satellites in eastern Europe to Russian occupa-
pation in the event of war, and so push them out of the Nazi frying
pan into the Soviet fire. These reasons in sum were not conclusive.
But they were strong enough so that Britain refused until too late to
look to Moscow for help.

Many Britons looked instead to Geneva. In the mid-193CTs popu-
lar faith in the League and in collective security was widespread.
But it rested on a misapprehension. The preponderant moral, eco-
nomic, and military force behind the defenders of the status quo
assured security only if they had the will to use it collectively. But
the peace-loving states loved their own particular parts of the peace
rather than peace as a whole, and they could not agree in advance

357

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

consciously . . . terminate the endless German drive to the south
and west of Europe and direct our gaze towards the lands in the
east. We finally terminate the colonial and trade policy of the pre-
war period, and proceed to the territorial policy of the future." 1

Hitler s eastern ambitions of course involved him with Russia, but
he calculated that she would not dare act alone until too late. The
real key to his problem was in the West. France was committed to
opposing him, as much because of her eastern satellites as of her
Russian alliance, and he planned to immobilize her at the outset; if
she did not move then, she would lose the initiative. As for Britain,
he would give her no sufficient cause of action. He was as deter-
mined as Bismarck not to attack her interests direcdy; he abstained
from reviving the Drang nach Osten, from demanding the return
of Germany's overseas empire, and above all from building a great
navy. He intended to undermine the foundation of Britain's security
by dominating Continental Europe. But the direction of his advance
eastward, against her oldest enemy was calculated to lull her
fears until the time for effective action had passed.

His military means of aggression were actually as dangerous to
Britain as the Kaiser's navy had been. The growth of the Luftwaffe
into the most formidable air force in the world removed the age-old
premises of British insularity, and made the Channel as archaic a
defense as a castle moat. But the danger was a sudden apparition,
and it was new in kind. The minor air raids of the first World War
had given the islanders no inkling of what air power meant, and
during the first and crucial years of German rearmament their aware-
ness lagged behind reality. The lag was reflected in an unprepared-
ness, psychological as much as military, that led them to the debacle
of Munich. For their imagination, like their defenses, was still con-
centrated on the sea rather than the air. When a traveler mentioned
to his English hostess that he had arrived from South America by
an unusual rout a Zeppelin from Brazil to Germany and then a
plane to London she capped his story with the remark that her
daughter had just been "from Wapping to Edinburgh by boatF

Such insularity, confronted by a new dimension of danger, merely
retreated into itself. The public could not be roused, and the few
who attempted to rouse it condemned themselves to frustration.

1 Hitler: Mein Kampf (New York, 1939), p. 950; quoted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.

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all the consequences on those two intelligent mediocrities is to miss
the spirit of the times.

II The Undeclared War

THE DEVELOPMENT of aggression in the 1930*$ is still too famil-
iar to require more than brief mention. Three powers took the lead
in refashioning the postwar settlement: in 1931 Japan embarked
upon open imperialism in China; in 1935 Italy did the same in Ethi-
opia; simultaneously Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles, and
in 1938 began the territorial expansion that led quickly to world war.
These moves jeopardized, in one part of the world or another, the
immediate interests of every other great power of Britain, Russia,
and the United States in the Far East, of Britain in Africa, of France
and Russia in Europe. But the powers failed to combine, and in
crisis after crisis their interests were assailed separately and suc-
cessfully.

The first move by Japan showed the weakness of the League.
Among its members Britain was the only great power seriously con-
cerned. But she was in the most desperate phase of her economic
crisis, and Mukden seemed far away; she rejected even a mild
American proposal for joint action. China gained nothing from her
appeal to the League, and Japan withdrew from it. Aggression in
itself could not start the machinery of sanctions. The only remaining
question was whether a great power would do so when aggression
patently menaced its security.

This question arose in the Ethiopian crisis. When Mussolini de-
cided to appropriate Ethiopia, the last island of native rule left from
the partition of Africa, he knew that he was inviting the opposition
of Britain. Her hold on Suez, already weakened by the rise of Egyp-
tian nationalism, would be seriously endangered if the Italians seized
the highlands between the Nile and the Red Sea. France was dis-
posed to be pro-Italian, on the other hand, because of her rising fear
of Germany: in the spring of 1935 Hitler reintroduced open con-
scription in defiance of Versailles, and revealed the formidable
strength of the Nazi air force. This development was Mussolini's
chance. He fortified himself by an agreement with France and sent
his armies into Ethiopia.

The British government was in a quandary. The French had a

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her coastline exposed and her empire and economy dependent on
the sea, must never challenge the mistress of the Mediterranean. His
defiance eventually destroyed him, but for the moment it showed
the depths to which British prestige had sunk.

Worse was to come. In the summer of 1936 the Spanish Civil War
broke out, and it rapidly developed into an international war in
miniature. Germany and Italy assisted Franco's fascists while Russia
gave some help to the republicans. Britain and France were again
in a quandary. For both of them a friendly Spain was vital, and for-
eign intervention made her friendship unlikely; a Franco victory
might bind her to the Axis, a republican victory to Moscow. Yet
neither Britain nor France dared take a strong line against inter-
vention for fear of precipitating a general war. They protested and
did nothing while the republic was slowly strangled. When Axis
submarines established a blockade of the Spanish coast, Low's great
cartoon pictured Britain watching this piracy over the caption, '"Bri-
tannia waves the rules."

Meanwhile another republic went by the board. Ever since the
peace conference the independence of Austria had been a cardinal
tenet of France and Italy, neither of whom wished to see the Ger-
mans ensconced on the Brenner. But by the spring of 1938 Mussolini
was so deeply committed in Spain that he could no longer hold out
against his Axis partner. Hitler struck as suddenly as he had in the
Bhin eland. Again the French hesitated, and again the British felt
that the Nazis had a case. Austria, after all, was populated by Ger-
mans, and her economic independence was precarious; why should
she not be absorbed by the nation to which she naturally belonged?
The reason was neither ethnic nor economic, but military. The
French sensed it by an instinct on which they dared not act. The
British missed it, and six months later Hitler brought it home to
them.

His invasion of Austria was the opening move in his advance to
the East. Once he controlled the Danube to the edge of Hungary,
he almost surrounded the Slavic bastion of Bohemia. This was his
next meal. But he was too shrewd to devour it in one gulp and
thereby precipitate war; Czechoslovakia was allied with France,
France was tied to Britain and possibly to Russia. He preferred a
bloodless victory on the installment plan. His first demand was a
modification of the Czech frontier, particularly in the Sudeten Moun-

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though he believed, like Gladstone in the earlier crisis, that a meas-
ure of justice lay with the aggressor, his conduct of the negotiations
showed his conviction that the Czechs also had a case. The onus
of abandoning them rested technically upon France because of her
treaty obligation. But Britain had assumed moral responsibility for
them in assuming leadership, and at Munich she agreed to their
destruction: the loss of their mountain frontier delivered them help-
less into the hands of Hitler.

Whatever illusions Chamberlain brought back from Munich were
dissipated within a few months. In the spring of 1939 Hitler seized
what was left of Czechoslovakia. This was a logical step in his ad-
vance, and violated his pledges no more flagrantly than many of his
earlier moves, but it produced a sudden shift in British opinion.
Now that he had appropriated for the first time a non-German peo-
ple, the most wishful thinking could no longer conceal the nature of
his appetite. If it could not be sated within the limits of German
nationality, a vast meal lay before him in the East from Poland to
the Balkans. On that food the new caesar would grow too great to
be withstood. The British realized that he was seeking not to revise
the Versailles settlement but to dominate Europe, and realization
gave them at long last unity and purpose. Chamberlain reversed his
policy almost overnight by extending a guarantee to Poland, already
marked as Hitler's next victim. In the summer of 1939, unlike that
of 1914, Britain was explicitly committed to fighting if Germany at-
tacked.

The commitment was diplomatically dangerous because it de-
creased the chance that the Poles would compromise. It was strategi-
cally absurd because France and Britain had no means to implement
it. They -were preparing for a defensive war behind the barriers of
the Maginot Line and the Royal Navy, in the hope of defeating
Germany a second time by attrition, and in such a war Poland
would be extinguished like Serbia before her. The one hope of sav-
ing her was to avert war, and this could be done, if at all, only by
securing the support of Russia. At the twelfth hour, therefore, the
French and British governments opened negotiations with Moscow.

They were too late. During the Czech crisis they had eoctinguished
what litde life remained in the Franco-Soviet alliance by osten-
tatiously ignoring Russia, and so had translated into policy the
rueful French pharse, "mieux Hitler que Stalin." When they tried

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tributed to the civilian population, and lights were blacked out
across the country against the bombers that were momentarily ex-
pected. This was war in a new guise, somber and humdrum, and the
British faced it as a disaster to be endured. They had no inkling of
what lay ahead. But after a decade of shortsighted confusion and
false hopes they were once more gathering their strength and be-
ginning to find themselves.

Ill The Nazi Offensive in the West

FOR Britain the opening months of the war had a dreamlike quality.
Instead of the prophesied air raids the skies were clear; instead of a
holocaust on the Western Front the armies were inactive behind
their fortifications. At sea the submarine offensive of 1917 was not re-
newed, and the few German surface raiders were efficiently hunted
down. In the East, it is true, the Nazis destroyed Poland in a light-
ning campaign, and the Russians joined them for a third partition of
the unhappy country. But Hitler's first experiment in blitzkrieg
meant little to the West. Allied strategists had already written off
Poland, and they assumed that the war as a whole would follow a
different pattern. The initial inactivity in the main theater strength-
ened their assumption, for a stalemate was what they had expected.

In 1914 the French had been imbued with the doctrine of the
offensive, but they had slowly unlearned it through years of slaugh-
ter. The lesson of modern weapons seemed to be that a front held
in force could not be broken until the home front itself collapsed.
This premise was particularly attractive to the British and French
governments of the 1930*8 because it coincided with their defensive
mood. They had neither the will nor the ready cash to plan a mas-
sive assault, and they therefore prepared to stand behind fixed lines.
Hitler, they calculated, would be contained in central Europe and
so defeated. If he sought to break out to the East, he would entangle
himself with. Russia. If he tried the West, his manpower would be
squandered against the allied defenses. If he remained inactive, he
would be doomed to the slow attrition of blockade. This was the
essence of allied strategy.

It was based on a fatal error. What Hitler had called "the uni-
versal motorization of the world" had altered the balance between
attack and defense. The chief innovations of the earlier war, the

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on the northern end of the Maginot Line, at Sedan, and developed
its thrust across the Belgian lowlands. The bulk of the allied mech-
anized forces advanced to meet it. The Nazis, however, were too bril-
liant to be repetitive. Their main drive was in fact aimed through the
Ardennes at the hinge itself; the purpose was not to crush the allied
armies behind an opening door, but to break their center and cut
them in two. The French army guarding Sedan disintegrated under
the impact, and the German tanks poured across northern France.
When they reached the coast at Abbeville, almost the whole of the
British contingent and some of the French were surrounded in Bel-
gium, powerless to break through southward to the bulk of the
French army. This time there was to be no retreat to the Marne.

The Germans turned first to destroying the northern segment. The
Belgian army capitulated, and the Anglo-French force was driven
back on the only possible port of egress, the little resort town of
Dunkirk. Up and down the coast of Britain went the call for ships,
and it was answered by the most motley armada that has ever
played its part in modern war; everything from passenger ships to
yachts and trawlers set out for Belgium, chaperoned by the navy
and precariously covered by the Royal Air Force. German pressure
on the exhausted troops slackened, for reasons that are not yet clear,
and more than a third of a million men were evacuated. It was four
years almost to the day before the Union Jack returned to northern
Europe.

'The miracle of Dunkirk" was only a glimmer of hope in the dark.
The German armies wheeled south, cut through the improvised de-
fenses, and forced France to surrender. Mussolini entered the war.
He was confident that the worst of the fighting was over, and that
the dissolving British Empire would yield him rich spoils in Africa.
The fall of Britain seemed, even to her friends, a matter only of
months. She had a woefully small army salvaged from the wreck,
and almost all its equipment had been left in Belgium. Her air
force was scarcely tried and was heavily outnumbered by the Luft-
waffe. Her navy had serious deficiencies and an appalling task. De-
fense of the home islands was more precarious than ever before in
her modern history, and defense of the empire appeared impossible.

The British, fortunately, could not see their position for what it
was. Merely because they had never lost a war they did not believe
that they could lose one. "The general f eeling," as one of them put

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cushion its impact on the Americas. Churchill had ample reason to
say that American and British affairs "will have to be somewhat
mixed up together."

They were equally mixed up in the Pacific, where the European
crisis was the opportunity for Japan. Britain's erstwhile ally was
now an enemy, with designs ranging from Hong Kong to Australia;
to meet them Britain had strengthened Singapore, but after Dunkirk
her great base was virtually without ships. She depended thence-
forth, tacitly but clearly, upon the United States Pacific Fleet. Be-
cause the Philippines lay on the flank of any Japanese advance
southward, an attack on the United States was an almost essential
prelude to aggression. The effect of European developments was to
throw upon the American navy the burden of a vast defensive in
the Pacific, for which it was unprepared. Although its strength was
hurriedly increased, Japan prepared with even greater intenmess to
exploit her chance. In September 1940, as if to underline her de-
signs, she concluded a pact with the Axis that was a thinly disguised
threat to the United States.

In Europe the fall of France had more immediate repercussions.
Italy attacked the British army in Egypt and began the seesaw
desert campaigns that lasted for the next two years; simultaneously
she made ready to gather Balkan spoils by a war against Greece.
Russia looked on uneasily. Although she pushed her frontiers west-
ward, from Rumania to Finland, her position was unenviable. Her
hopes for a war of attrition in the West had vanished, the buffer
states between her and Germany were gone, and the Italians were
gnawing at the Balkans. She was alone on the Continent against a
triumphant Axis.

In Berlin the triumph produced a confusion of counsel. The next
step was obviously the defeat of Britain, but the method was not
obvious. Hitler believed that the islanders would see the strategic
hopelessness of their position and ask for terms; precious time passed
before he realized that they really meant to fight him, as Churchill
promised, on the beaches, in the streets, and in the hills. He ac-
cepted the challenge to the point of planning an invasion, but his
plans seem to have been half-hearted.

Well they might be. Unless he achieved another blitzkrieg, what
might Russia do in the East? And for a cross-Channel blitzkrieg the
Nazis were unprepared: they lacked experience in amphibious op-

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tion. A projected attack on Gibraltar was abandoned, and Egypt
was assigned a minor role. At the very moment when the islanders'
peril seemed to be increasing, it was beginning to ebb.

In Africa Hitler was compelled to intervene, but he did so re-
luctantly. His mind was dominated by the great land spaces of the
East; he considered the African theater as subordinate, and he in-
tended to win Suez cheaply or not at all. Before the end he com-
mitted more than a quarter of a million men to the desert, but
never in sufficient force to overcome British resistance. He grasped
less clearly than Napoleon the crucial importance of Egypt, because
he understood even less the workings of sea power.

In the Balkans he was also involved against his will. He feared
that the British, based on Greece, might strike against his flank
when he became involved in Russia, and to eject them he had to
fight his way through Jugoslavia; the Serbs again, as in 1914, pre-
ferred extinction to surrender. The Nazis crushed them and poured
south into Greece, where they drove the small British force back on
Crete. The Luftwaffe routed the Royal Navy, and Crete was aban-
doned. Hitler had secured his Balkan flank* Jugoslav, Greek, and
British resistance, however, had postponed his assault on Russia for
a month, and he could afford delay no better than Napoleon in
1812. Campaigning had changed, but General Winter had not

IV Counteroffensive

BRITAIN'S desperate year ended on June 22, 1941, when the Ger-
man move eastward altered the whole face of the war. The effect
was felt from Washington to Tokyo. The tempo of American inter-
vention was accelerated. In the spring, after bitter debate, the
United States had become an economic belligerent with the passage
of Lend-Lease, and its provisions were promptly extended to the
Soviet Union. Because Britain alone could not deliver Lend-Lease
supplies in sufficient quantity to the Eastern Front, Iceland was oc-
cupied as an American base on the principal route, and the Ameri-
can navy took over the protection of the western sea lanes. In Sep-
tember 1941 Roosevelt ordered the fleet to sink German submarines
on sight. This was open if undeclared war. Within fifteen months of
the fall of France the United States had traveled the same road as
in the thirty months after the Battle of the Marne, and the second

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prophets by their tenacity and skill, and maintaining their resistance
was vital for the Western allies a convenient if inaccurate phrase
for the congeries of governments and governments-in-exile led by
Britain and the United States. Only Russia could give the West time
to prepare its counteroffensive. But supplying her was as acute a
problem as in the first World War: although the Soviet state had
greater industrial resources than the czarist, the demands of motor-
ized war were also greater. By the old route around Scandinavia
which the Germans in Norway made costly but could not close
and by a new route through Iran, Russia received enough equip-
ment to eke out her own resources. She stood, battered and reeling,
and the Nazis* hoped-for battle of annihilation eluded them as it
had Napoleon. By the end of October 1942 they were at Stalingrad,
on the edge of Asia, but their hold on their enormous gains was pre-
carious. They had not yet achieved decisive victory, and the Western
allies had had time to gather their strength.

In the summer of 1942 the United States and Britain faced a stag-
gering task. The Japanese advance into the Pacific had been stopped
in the Coral Sea and at Midway; the counterattack was yet to be
launched, and the allied high command had decided to subordi-
nate it to victory in Europe. Japan's defeat would scarcely shake the
Nazis, whereas their defeat would ruin her. Europe was the crux of
the war. It could not be reconquered on the Eastern Front alone, if
only because of logistics; the allies therefore had to concert a gigan-
tic pincers movement from East and West. This meant, on the West,
invasion of the Continent from outside. Such a feat on such a scale
had never been attempted in the history of warfare, but there was
no alternative.

A chief prerequisite for attack, in Europe as in the Pacific, was
sea power. The allies had to create not only armies and air forces
but the shipping to transport and supply them and the naval
strength to control the sea lanes. Naval expansion affected Britain
and the United States differently, because the geography of the war
produced an allocation of effort: the eastern Atlantic, the Mediter-
ranean, and the Indian Ocean were the bailiwick of the British; the
rest of 'the Atlantic was divided between them and the Americans,
with some help from the Canadians; the Pacific was primarily an
American responsibility. The Pacific is as large as all the other
oceans combined, and was the only one in which enemy sea power

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from the air and speed in building up supplies ashore, and to save
time for planes and ships the beachheads had to be as close as
feasible to the airfields and ports of the British Isles. Normandy
satisfied these requirements, and it had the additional advantage
that the Cotentin Peninsula, once it was occupied, could be pro-
tected on both flanks by sea power.

By 1943, when the Mediterranean theater seemed to be the focus
of the European war, it was already becoming subsidiary. Sicily and
southern Italy were conquered, but in the Apennines the invasion
bogged down in siege operations like those of the first World War.
Allied planes, however, had bases in Italy from which they could
reach targets hitherto out of range; this was a solid gain, for the
whole allied strategy now hinged on the air offensive. As the Ger-
man hope of crossing the Channel had depended on defeating the
R. A. F., so the Anglo-American hope of crossing it depended on
defeating the Luftwaffe. The allies, unlike the Germans, had pre-
pared for a systematic aerial assault on the factories and refineries,
the tool shops and rail network, upon which airplane production
rested. If Germany's air force were destroyed, her armies would be
blind.

During the winter of 1943-4 the offensive mounted, and by spring
its strategic aims were largely achieved. A concurrent tactical offen-
sive then developed against military installations in France, and it
gradually focused on the area northwest of Paris. In early June the
Luftwaffe had virtually disappeared from the sky over France, and
the destruction of bridges and railroads had isolated Normandy
from the rest of the country. In the Channel an enormous concen-
tration of naval strength, British and American, provided artillery
support for the initial landings. Four years after Dunkirk the stage
was set, and the whirligig of time had brought in bis revenges.

The invasion launched on June 6 went according to plan; its un-
precedented difficulties receded one by one into the quiet of accom-
plished fact. The beachheads were established and joined and the
German counterattacks shattered; British pressure against Caen
drew Nazi strength eastward until the Americans were able to break
through to the west, envelop the enemy's main force, and crush it
between them and the British. The allies then drove across France,
and in August they also invaded the Rhine valley. The Germans ex-
tricated what they could and fell back on the Rhine defenses that

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The war prepared the English-speaking peoples for opportunity
by stretching their imagination. It was a global war to a far greater
extent than the previous one, and it forced the man in the street -
whether of Melbourne, Johannesburg, Winnipeg, Liverpool, or De-
troit - to think in terms of vast spaces if he thought at all. Austra-
lians and New Zealanders recognized their relationship with Asia;
South Africans were no longer insulated from the rest of Africa
when their troops fought through Ethiopia and Libya; Canadians
accepted a Battle of Midway as part of their defense in one hemi-
sphere, and bombed Germany as part of an Anglo-Canadian offen-
sive in the other. The British lost much of their aloofness from the
outside world as their soldiers went to the far corners of it, and the
millions at home learned beyond chance of forgetting that their
frontiers are at the farthest range of a bombing plane. In the United
States, above all, the war jolted the self-absorbed isolation that the
first World War had scarcely touched. Americans became conscious
of their strength when their survival depended upon it; their troops
and ships and planes and supplies reached parts of the world of
which few had ever heard, and they began to develop an awareness
almost as wide as the ranging of their power. Mental horizons were
broadened by circumstance.

This awareness, in the United States and throughout the Com-
monwealth, -was supplemented and stimulated during the war by a
new experience of co-operation. The teamwork of Americans, Aus-
tralians, and New Zealanders in the Pacific, of Canadians, Ameri-
cans, and British in the Atlantic and the skies over Europe, cul-
minated in the integration of power that broke Hitler's Western
defenses. Such thorough and global collaboration between sovereign
states had never before been seen; it was a four-year experiment in
hanging together instead of separately. The experiment evolved pri-
marily among the English-speaking peoples partly because they
understood each other better than they understood the Russians or
Chinese, partly because geography forced them to a more minute
co-ordination of effort. In the determination of basic policy they
became a virtual unit; joint boards mapped the strategy of produc-
tion and military operations, and each state exercised an influence
roughly proportionate to its contribution. Because the American
contribution was eventually the largest, in supplies, finance, and
military power, leadership devolved in general upon the United

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war, she was no more likely than India to return to European tute-
lage. Japan, the major instrument of these changes, was herself re-
duced to impotence, and the occupation of her islands projected
American power one stage farther west. British influence declined
as American rose, and the complex pre-war balance of great powers
gave place to an uneasy equilibrium of the United States and
Russia.

The changes in Europe were more sweeping. There the destruc-
tion of the old order was on a scale even Napoleon had never
achieved. Where he had left his principal enemies defeated but in-
dependent, Hitler had yoked his to the service of the Reich. He had
wrenched them out of their accustomed economic, social, and politi-
cal orbits, the allied air offensive had paralyzed their cities and rail-
roads, and finally the invasion of Europe had brought back from
exile or up from the resistance movements unfamiliar and untried
regimes. In these circumstances the lesser states of Europe were in
no position to mitigate, as they had in the past, the friction between
the major powers.

The number of those powers had been more drastically cut than
ever before. After the Napoleonic Wars the Big Five of the eight-
eenth century had between them continued to supervise the Con-
tinent. After the first World War one of the six major pre-war states,
Austria-Hungary, had disappeared, but by the time of Locarno the
remaining five once more formed a balance of sorts. After 1945 the
situation was different in kind. Germany had not been curtailed as
a power, like the Germany of 1918; she had been wiped out for the
predictable future. Her place in the European scales could not be
filled by her old rival, France; the heritage of Richelieu and Ix>uis
XIV, of the two Napoleons, even of Foch, had evaporated in the
debacle of 1940, and the subsequent years of Nazi rule had driven
home the truth foreshadowed years before, that the days of French
political hegemony were over. A continental balance of power, in
short, was at least for a time nonexistent.

The vacuum in Europe, as in Asia, drew into itself from opposite
directions the Soviet Union and the United States. Russia expanded
her influence beyond the fondest dreams of her pre-war imperialists;
her armies had overrun Poland, eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia,
much of Austria, and almost all the Balkans, and at the close of
hostilities her effective frontier ran from the Elbe to the Adriatic.

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Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

cause Soviet imperialism is more dynamic and partly because Brit-
ain cannot look to the Continent for effective assistance. Since 1945
she has felt Russian pressure in the old breeding grounds of quar-
rels-Greece, Turkey, Iran -and has met it only with assistance
from outside Europe. Her position from the Middle East to the
Balkans has been buttressed and in some areas, like Greece, virtually
taken over by the United States, who has simultaneously assumed
the leading role in the defense of western Europe. This American
intrusion means that Britain is dependent to a degree she would
have found unthinkable a generation ago, but to which she has now
adapted herself with little sign of rancor or humiliation. The United
States, in turn, has treated her as an equal. The two powers can-
not afford to antagonize each other. Their wartime partnership to
destroy Hitler is being remolded into a peacetime partnership to
contain Russia, and the second requires as dose accord as the
first.

In these circumstances the continuance of the Anglo-Soviet alli-
ance of 1942 is a diplomatic anomaly, though of a kind often seen
before. An alliance is only as important as the participants are will-
ing to make it, and willingness depends upon their conception of
their interests. The Anglo-Japanese alliance became moribund in
1918, when the defeat of Germany and the collapse of Russia re-
moved the reasons for its existence; the Franco-Soviet pact of 1985
was vitiated from the start by the fact that neither side trusted the
other. So with the Anglo-Soviet treaty. It is still nominally binding,
but the victory of 1945 removed the one vital interest holding the
allies together, and brought into the open the conflict of their other
interests. Britain since has been committed on paper to Russia, yet
at loggerheads with her. She has been uncommitted to the United
States, yet deeply allied with her.

So much for the strange character of the peace. A wholly new
power structure has emerged, and it contains only three great states.
Russia is at war with all the world outside her own sphere, while
Britain and the United States are tied to each other, to the Com-
monwealth, and to the states of western Europe on whose recon-
struction their own survival depends. In the traditional sense this
is not peace at all. It is a state of unparalleled flux, and for Britain
it brings unparalleled difficulties. The elimination of the European
balance of power undermines the postulates on which her statecraft

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diplomatic decline in the face of great new powers. The underlying
causes of this recession were inherent in Britain's heyday. She was
strong during the Pax Britannica not because she lacked potential
rivals, like Rome of the Pax Romana, but because the states of Eu-
rope lacked the incentive to challenge her highly specialized com-
plex of interests. By Bismarck's time the incentive was developing,
and Britain's power began to weaken. Two world wars accelerated
the change, and the second dramatized it.

But decline has not yet produced, despite frequent and confident
prophecies, the f all of the British Empire. The colonies and depend-
encies that are shaking off British rule are not necessarily under-
mining the empire; they are emerging as members of the Common-
wealth, and the Commonwealth is elastic. Material power is not the
only mortar of that strange fabric. The continuance of the monarchy
is a symptom of a different kind of bond: when a group of nations
retains one king as their nominal governor on condition that he do
no governing, and recognizes the Crown as an expression of their
paradoxical unity in independence, they have outgrown the usual
conventions of political science. This sophistication has made the
Commonwealth possible and holds it together by subtleties the
pull of sentiment, memories of past collaboration, the ties of lan-
guage. The centripetal force obviously varies among the members.
Eire has seceded; South Africa holds aloof, and the attitude of the
new dominions is still unpredictable. Australia, New Zealand, and
Canada, the dominions most clearly within the orbit of American
power, are also those that put most stress on the intangibles of the
British connection. While the intangibles endure, so does the new
concept of empire.

If the Commonwealth still stands firm, so does Britain herself.
Her long story is far from finished, unless civilization as we know it
is near its end, for there is nothing decadent about the British peo-
ple of today. They are as strong as ever, and in some ways stronger.
The war proved their doggedness, skill, and energy, and released in
them a force that is now revolutionizing their society. They are en-
gaged in writing their next chapter, and it promises to be both lively
and significant reading.

The general election of 1945 initiated their most drastic experi-
ment with democracy. When the voters repudiated Churchill at the
moment of victory and gave their overwhelming support to Labour,

385

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

VI Crystal-Gazing

DO these momentous changes justify conjecturing about the future?
Detailed conjecture is obviously a waste of time, but certain general
factors are worth considering. Their interaction, while not wholly
predictable, will shape the course of events. One factor has already
been mentioned: Britain's position as a world power has declined
sharply, and there is no reason to suppose that the decline is tempo-
rary; the void left in the Commonwealth and to a large extent in
Europe is being filled by the United States. This factor alone is mis-
leading. It suggests, if taken by itself, that the United States is about
to dominate the world and establish on the ruins of the British Em-
pire a Pax Americana. When other factors are taken into account,
the suggestion seems improbable.

One such factor is the composition of the new alignment. The
United States cannot dictate to the dominions without turning them
into enemies; they have been bred in the twin traditions of col-
laboration and independence, and show no signs of sacrificing the
second to the first. Neither can she dictate to Britain, who is too
powerful to be a puppet and too important to be ignored; the Brit-
ish Isles are the strategic keystone for any defense of western Eu-
rope, and British co-operation is essential to any league spanning the
Atlantic. Another factor is the quality of leadership required. Soviet
dominance may rest on coercion, but American cannot afford to.
Fear of Russia has tightened the Anglo-American entente, and has
extended it to western Europe in the form of the Atlantic Pact; that
fear and its converse, Russia's fear of the West, are dividing the
world into two camps as Europe was divided before 1914. But the
present division is one between principles as well as powers. On
the one hand is the principle of coercive force, on the other that of
voluntary collaboration, and the second cannot conquer the first
by force without corrupting itself.

Corruption is already under way. After two world wars Britain
and the United States have grown used to coercion, and their con-
science has been correspondingly blunted as witness the contrast
between their attitudes toward the two wars. Germany outraged
Britain in 1914 by invading a neutral, and the United States in 1917
by submarine warfare. Twenty-five years later Hitler and Mussolini
repeated the same crimes and added the wholesale bombing of civil-

387

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

prospect revolutionizes the position of every Anglo-Saxon democ-
racy.

The effects upon Britain are already evident She is rapidly ap-
proaching, if she has not akeady reached, the point where a major
war threatens her with annihilation. The prospect is still too novel
to have revolutionized her policy, for there has always been a lag
between the development of new weapons and the realization of
what they imply. But development proceeds inexorably, and realiza-
tion must follow. For the first time in her history Britain cannot
afford to fight. At the start of the atomic era war is ceasing to be for
her what Clausewitz considered it, the continuation of diplomatic
policy by other means, and is becoming the negation of policy in
suicide.

Events of the second World War demonstrated that the bedrock
of her security is crumbling. The action off Crete, for example, had a
significance out of all proportion to its bearing on strategy: German
land-based planes drove away the Royal Navy and opened the island
to invasion; the lesson, if Britain were substituted for Crete and
France for Greece, was that the navy alone no longer offered sure
defense. Three years later the invasion of Normandy showed that
coastal fortifications, carefully designed and strongly manned, could
be broken by a sea and air assault. The Channel became a road for
successful attack, and it is not a one-way road. Britain's army and
navy in conjunction are insufficient to bar it against an invader. If
she ever loses control of the air, her days are numbered.

In the closing phase of the war the danger from the air grew into
something she could not hope to control. The German V-l, or jet-
propelled bomb, was dealt with by orthodox methods, but the V-2
could not be. A rocket traveling faster than sound and sight is im-
mune to present defenses and must be stopped, if at all, at its point
of origin. The only certain way to preclude a rocket attack is to con-
trol directly or indirectly the entire area within which it might be
mounted. For Britain that area already embraces the coast and
hinterland of much of northwestern Europe, and her security has
ceased to be an insular problem. Before the end of the war it tran-
scended the province of all her armed services combined, and the
days of 1940 were ancient history; she could scarcely hope again to
stand alone against an enemy controlling western Europe and armed

389

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

perate gamble, and no government responsible to the voters would
be likely to take the risk; a surprise onslaught at a moment of nomi-
nal peace is out of character for a democracy. Defense through dis-
persion is not geographically feasible for Britain. The only remain-
ing possibility, if she depends on her own resources, would be to
amass the weapons with which to strike back and then hope that
their existence would deter assault. This strategy would be at best
a counsel of despair, for it would involve catastrophe if the threat
of retaliation were ignored. Yet in terms of Britain's own military
resources no better method is apparent.

British security, like American, is now identified with the collec-
tive security of many other states. At present the sign of identifica-
tion is the Atlantic Pact, which may be the beginning of an effective
coalition. Its military side is only one of its aspects, and perhaps not
the most important. The amassing of armaments and the formula-
tion of joint defensive plans is a dangerous if necessary process. The
attempt to deter aggression can seem from Moscow to be aggres-
sion, and a league to prevent war defeats itself if it goads the enemy
to attack.

The real effectiveness of the coalition will depend more on moral
factors than on military, If its members hope to preserve what is left
of the peace, they will have to draw closer together. But their chief
aim cannot be to prepare for a conflict with Russia that would de-
feat their whole purpose, or for an agreement of which there seems
no immediate hope. They must attempt to knit the non-communist
nations of the world into a group with sufficent cohesive strength to
give pause to Soviet aggression and sufficient wisdom to avoid pro-
voking it. Such a group is forming, and its growth will test the
democratic capacity for collaboration as it has never been tested be-
fore. If it rises to the test, a world-wide coalition will develop with
Anglo-American power for its core.

But the sense of power will have to be curbed by an overriding
sense of moderation. Moderation will be sorely tried. To recognize
the communist's premise without accepting it, to see that his war
against capitalism has no limits of time or method and yet to retain
a belief in ultimate compromise, requires a degree of perception and
self-control as unprecedented for Britain as for the United States.
Yet nothing less can succeed.

This is only part of the challenge. Moderation in itself is a nega-

391

Sleep and Waking, 1932-1945

la's Europe. The Russians share the human capacity to learn, and
military developments stimulate learning: a communist is as badly
off as a capitalist in radioactive ruins. The point seems to be rapidly
coming, if it has not already coine, where no belligerent can hope
to be victorious in the traditional sense, and at that point the logical
grounds for fighting give way before the logic of compromise. If the
democracies in general, and Britain and the United States in par-
ticular, can maintain agreement among themselves, subordinate their
national sovereignties to the needs of the group, and use their corpo-
rate strength with moderation, they may maintain the surface of
peace until communism, in the fullness of time, discards its dream
of destroying all other forms of government. That time may never
come. But to work in the hope that it will is the only antidote to
despair.

Britain's role in the great experiment is likely to be crucial. Al-
though it may be subordinate to the American from the viewpoint
of power, the democracies need clear thinking at least as much as
armaments. Because war would be more obviously catastrophic for
the British than for any other people, they have more pressing rea-
sons to think clearly. If their policy is dominated by the need for
peace and they can afford nothing less they will help to set the
character of the new alignment and evoke its creative energies.

Britain is its nexus. Her imperial interests have tied her to the
world overseas, and her geographic position has involved her in the
Continent; her sense of Europe, sharpened by the diplomatic experi-
ence of centuries, is invaluable to transatlantic nations that must
now involve themselves in turn. Her socialist regime is of moment
to every democracy. Her attitude toward Russia, for all its rooted
distrust, may mature perforce into a realistic pacifism. For these
reasons, if no others, she has the opportunity for leadership in the
struggle to preserve the West.

She is caught up by the crisis, and her exposed position makes
the challenge peculiarly immediate for her. But she does not face
it alone. Her old aloofness is gone; she is part of a cohering federa-
tion of western Europe and America, with outposts spread across
the globe. Yet she is not submerged in the new grouping. She re-
mains herself. Her long past, climaxed by the enormous readjust-
ments of this century, has left her far from decadent If her material

393

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

ANY ONE writing a study of this sort is bound to be, as Disraeli
said of Peel, a burgler of other men's ideas. I am consciously or
unconsciously indebted to every historian I have read. To acknowl-
edge the debt by listing all the books would produce only a melange
of the good and bad, the sprightly and dull, which would have far
less value than the bibliographies in all the standard textbooks. But
I have relied in the main on a small group of authors, and to men-
tion them, even at the risk of seeming arbitrary, is the least return
I can make for the help they have given me.

The two general textbooks of British history on which I have prin-
cipally drawn are William E. Lunt, History of Engknd (third edi-
tion; New York and London: Harper & Brothers; 1945) and Ar-
thur L. Cross, A Shorter History of England and Greater Britain
(third edition; New York: The Macmillan Co.; 1939). A stimulating
text, which presupposes some knowledge of the subject, is George M.
Trevelyan, History of England (New York and London: Longmans,
Green & Co.; 1926). The evolution of British naval predominance is
clearly traced in William O. Stevens and Allan F. Westcott, A His-
tory of Sea Power (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co.; 1942). A
classic work on the evolution of Parliament is difficult but reward-
ing: Charles H. Mcllwain, The High Court of Parliament and Its
Supremacy (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1910), In the eco-
nomic field Ephraim Lipson, A Planned Economy or Free Enter-
prise; the Lessons of History (London: A. & C. Black, Ltd.; 1944) is
a provocative essay on the subject matter of his earlier book, The
Economic History of England (3 vols.; London: A. & C. Black, Ltd;
1915-31).

For the development of the empire and the dominions I have
made liberal use of Ramsay Muir, A Short History of the British
Commonwealth (2 vok; London: G. Philip & Son, Ltd; 1920-2),
which is an excellent synthesis of domestic and imperial affairs from
the days of the Romans to 1914. The author, like many others, de-
votes scant attention to the changes on the Continent that were de-
terminants of Britain's growth. These changes are covered, with

395

Bibliographical Note

the English and American Civil Wars: the Read* Lecture Delivered
^n the Senate House, Cambridge, on 14 June, 1910 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1910). Keith G. Failing, A History of
the Tory Party, 1640-1714 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press; 1924)
traces the origins and growth of Toryism from the Reformation to
the debacle of 1714. A more basic aspect of the Reformation is ex-
amined by Richard H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capital-
ism; a Historical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.; 1926),
which deals with the connection between the Protestant ethic and
the commercial spirit of the rising middle class. The thesis of the
book is still controversial. But, if only because its author is one of
the greatest living historians, it cannot be ignored by anyone in-
terested in the progress of ideas. Another classic of intellectual his-
tory, done on a narrower canvas, is George P. Gooch, The History of
English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; 1898).

For the eighteenth century as a whole I know nothing better than
William E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury (8 vols.; New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888-91), which I used
particularly for its vivid description of Methodism. An equally broad
survey of social and political conditions, but confined to the reign
of George III, is Sir George O. Trevelyan, The American Revolution
(4 vols.; New York: Longmans, Green & Co.; 1905-29) and George
III and Charles Fox, the Concluding Part of the American Revolu-
tion (2 vols.; New York: Longmans, Green & Co.; 1912r-4). The
Whiggism of Trevelyan has been partially offset on the political side
by Keith G. Feiling, The Second Tory Party, 1714-1832 (New York
and London: The Macmillan Co.; 1938) and by Geoffrey G. Butler's
delightful series of essays, The Tory Tradition: Bolingbroke Burke
Disraeli Salisbury (London: J. Murray; 1914). On the consti-
tutional side Lewis B. Namier has upset the traditional theories of
George Ill's experiment in his two works, The Structure of Politics
at the Accession of George III (2 vols.; London: Macmillan & Co.,
Ltd.; 1929) and England in the Age of the American Revolution
(London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; 1930). The outstanding treatment
of British naval policy during this crucial period is still Alfred T.
Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783
(twenty-fourth edition; Boston: Little, Brown & Co.; 1914) and The
Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire,

397

Bibliographical Note

Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Mao
millan & Co., Ltd.; 1940) and Conditions of Peace (New York: The
Macnaillan Co.; 1942). These are the authors to whom I am particu-
larly grateful. Where I have ventured to alter their ideas, the re-
sponsibility is mine.

399

INDEX

Afghanistan, Anglo-Russian friction in,
243, 276, 280, 281; and conclusion
of Triple Entente, 313

Africa, and sixteenth-century trade
routes, 47-8; in Treaty of Versailles
(1783), 161; nineteenth-century
European expansion in, 210, 270,
275, 276, 277, 287

Africa, North, British expansion in,
281-4, 287-8; and conclusion of
Entente Cordiale, 304; and Anglo-
German rivalry, 317; and Ethiopian
crisis, 361; in second World War,
369, 370-3, 376

Africa, South, see Boers, Boer War;
Union of South Africa

Air power, in second World War and
after, 376-7, 378, 381, 388-91; see
also Lutwaffe; Royal Air Force

Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, (1748),
136, 139

Alabama claims, settlement of, 276-7.

Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 189,
193, 198; death, 211.

Algeciras, Congress of, (1906), 305

Alliances: British, against Bourbon
France, 117, 119, 135, 137, 139-
40, against French Revolution and
Napoleon, 181-2, 188, 193, in con-
cert of Europe, 203, in Crimean
War, 241-3; French, with Czecho-
slovakia, etc., after first World War,
340, 363, 365, with Russia (1935),
357, 359, 365-6, 383. See also
An^Lo-Japanese alliance; Anglo-
Russian alliance; Atlantic Pact;
Axis; Dual Alliance; Russo-German
Pact; Triple Alliance

Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany
(1871), 270; source of Franco-Ger-
man bitterness, 293, 317; surren-
dered by Germany (1919), 335

America, Spanish possessions in, S2
118, 121, 196, 198; Elizabethan in-
terest in, 41, 47-8; Jacobean coloni-
zation, 58-9; Cromwellian concern
with, 90, 91-2; and rise of religious
toleration, 114; British rivalry with
Bourbon powers in, 133-5, 138-43;

America (continued)

and Monroe Doctrine, 208-10; Nazi
threat to, 370-1. See oho Revolu-
tion, American; Caribbean; United
States

Amiens, Peace of, (1802), 190, 198

Anglicanism: see Church of England

Anglo-Japanese alliance (1902), for-
mation and effects, 300, 803, 317,
326; abrogated, 341-2, 383

Anglo-Russian alliance, of second
World War, 376, 383

Anne, Queen of England, heiress pre-
sumptive, 105; death of her chil-
dren, 116; accession and reign, 122-
7, 130.

Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry YEO, 19-
23, 33

Anti-Corn-Law League, 226-8; men-
tioned, 253, 299

Apostolic succession, theory of, 24-5,
26, 27, 30; and Methodism, 180

Arabi, Egyptian colonel, his revolt and
its effects (1882), 282-8

Aristocracy, and Tudor gentry, 8-9,
14; in Hanoverian period, 128-30;
and first Reform Bill, 221-2; Dis-
raeli s views of, 247-8, 249^50; and
crisis of 1910, 309

Armada, Spanish, defeated, 42-S; ef-
fects of, 48

Armed Neutrality: of 1780, 160; of
1801, 189

Armistice of 1918, terms of, 332, 336

Army: English, sirieeatk-ceniury
weakness of, 7-8, 48; of Cromwell,
82-3, 94, 96-7; of James n, 110;
in settlement of Glorious Revolu-
tion, 113; and eighteenth-centey
patronage, 130, 151; rote in Chat-
ham's grand strategy, 139-40; in
American Revolution, 157-8, 100-1,
164; in Wars of French Revolution
and Napoleon, 181-2, 186, 196-7,
199-200; and Tory Reaction, 213;
in mid-Victorian period, 231; in
late-Victorian period, 2TT1-2; and
Irish crisis (1914), 311; reformed
before first World War, 317-8; in

Index

Bible, translated in reign of Henry

VIII, 28
Bill of Rights ( 1689), mentioned, 112,

178, 386
Billeting, of troops of Charles I, 62,

63

Bishops: see Episcopacy
Bismarck, Prince Otto von, and Dan-
ish War (1864), 251; and unifica-
tion of Germany, 269, 271; diplo-
macy when Chancellor of German
Empire, 270-1, 279-80, 283, 286,
287; and state socialism, 297; re-
tirement, 3001; compared with
Hitler, 359, 372; mentioned, 218,
250, 385

Black Sea, British strategic interests
in (1854), 242; remilitarized by
Russia (1870), 270; and crisis of
1878, 279

Blake, Robert, Cromwellian admiral,
90-1; compared with Jellicoe,
328

Blenheim, Battle of, (1704), 121
Blitzkrieg, in Austro- and Franco-
Prussian Wars, 273-4, 321; failure
of, in 1914-5, 321-2; by Nazis in
Poland, 367, and in France, 368-9;
and Battle of Britain, 371-2
Blockade: American, of Japan by sub-
marines, 378; British, and strategy
evolved in Seven Years' War, 140,
142, effect on maritime neutrals,
142, 160, in American Revolution,
158-9, 159-60, in Wars of French
Revolution and Napoleon, 188-9,
191, 192, 194-6, 197-8, 326, in
first World War, 326, 328, 331, in
second World War, 367; German,
by submarines in first World War,
326-7, 328-9, 330-1, in Spanish
Civil War, 363

Bliicher, Prince Gebhard von, Prus-
sian field marshal, in Waterloo cam-
paign, 200

Boers, early friction with British, 204,
232, 235-7; hostilities with British:
see Boer War; in Union of South
Africa, 343-4
Boer War: first (1880), 284-6, 290;
second (1899), outbreak of, 288-9,

293, background, 289-93, course,
293-5, and dominion co-operation,

294, 343, and Anglo-German re-
lations, 301, 302, 304, costs of, 308,
mentioned, 300

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Vis-
count, and Tory debacle of 1714,
126-7; quoted, 138, 214; men-
tioned, 141

Bonaparte: see Napoleon
Book of Common Prayer, in ragn of
Edward VI, 30-1; reissued by Eliz-
abeth, 35; imposed on Scots, 73;
Anglicans* loyalty to, in Puritan
Revolution, 84

Boroughs, in early Tudor period, 8-
12; attempted coercion of, by
Charles II and James II, 110; tri-
umph of, in Glorious Revolution,
113; rotten, uses and abolition of,
129-30, 132, 153, 219, 221; reform
of municipal government in, 999.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Treaty of San
Stefano, 278; in Treaty of Berlin,
279; and crisis of 1908, 314, 315;
and outbreak of first World War,
318-9
Bosporus, in Greek revolt, 211; in

crisis of 1878, 257, 281
Boston (Mass.), in American Revo-
lution, 155, 158

Boulogne, Napoleon at, 191, 193; Ger-
man drive toward (1915), 321
Bourbon, House of, accession in
Trance with Henry IV, 45; mar-
riage alliance with Stuarts, 61-2;
acquisition of Spanish throne, 117-
22, 134; collapse of regime of, in
France, 176-8, 180-1; members of:
see Henrietta Maria; Louis XIH;
Louis XIV; Phifip V
Boyne, Battle of the, (1690), 115-6;

mentioned, 185, 186, 267
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, ( 1918), 330,

331, 334, 335

Bright John, and Anti-Corn-Law
League, 227; and second Reform
Bill, 253

Britain, Battle of, (1940), 371-2
Brooke, Rupert, quoted, 320
Buckingham, George VilKers, Duke of,
favorite of James I and Charles I,
61-4

Bulgaria, in Treaty of San Stefano,

278; in Treaty of Berlin, 279; and

origins of first World War, S14, 315

Burgoyne, John, British general at

Saratoga, 158-9

Burke, Edmund, political philosophy
of, 147, 247, 249; and American
Revolution, 157, 163, 360; and im-

111

Index

with

Charles II (continued)

reign, 100-9; compared
George III, 151-2
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 17-

8, 20, 31-2; mentioned, 118
Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor,
candidate for Spanish throne when
Archduke, 11821; dynastic prob-
lem when Emperor, 134-5
Charles Edward Stuart, the Young

Pretender, 136
Chartism, aims and failure of, 224-5;

mentioned, 349

Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of (elder
Pitt), first ministry of, 138, 140-1;
character, 138-9; strategy, 139-40,
143, 159, 323; and American Revo-
lution, 153-4, 157; compared with
his son, 169, 181, and with Rhodes,
291; mentioned, 276, 368
Chesterton, G. K., quoted 223
China, and war with Japan (1894),
275; European attempt to partition,
301; and Anglo- Japanese alliance,
303; German cessions in, (1919),
335; Japanese aggression in,
(1931), 361; in contemporary
world, 380-1

Church of England: in England, un-
der Henry Vffl, 23-4, 27-9, 30,
132, under Edward VI, 29-31, un-
der Mary, 31-3, under Elizabeth,
34_8, 45, 50, under James I, 51-^,
55, under Charles I, 65-6, 70-3, 76,
77, and Cavaliers during Puritan
Revolution, 80-1, 84, at Restoration,
96, 100-1, 102-3, and James II,
110-1, under Anne, 125, 126, effect
of Hanoverian accession on, 127-8,
130, 147, in Burke's political phi-
losophy, 177, and Methodism, 179-
80, Disraeli's views of, 247, 248-9,
250, and Education Act (1870),
258, Chamberlain's proposal to dis-
establish, 267; in Ireland, 44, and
"Protestant ascendancy," 115-6,
163-4, 185-8, 214, 215-6, 267-8,
disestablished by Gladstone, 262
Churchill, John: see Marlborough
Churchill, Winston, compared with
Disraeli, 245; secession from Con-
servatives, 299; First Lord of Ad-
miralty, 321; and strategy of first
World War, 323-5; on 1^
328; secession from Liberals, 349
and Irish naval bases, 355; and

Churchill, Winston (continued)
Nazi menace, 360; Prime Minister,
368, 370, 371, 376; defeat (1945),
385-6; quoted, 374.
Civil War: American Revolution as,
151, 153-4, 156-9, 161; American
(1861), 162, 243, 251, 261-2, 269,
271, 321; English, in Puritan Revo-
lution, 81-3, 85; French, in six-
teenth century, 14, 38, 40; Spanish
(1936), 363

Clarendon Code, enacted, 100-1; ex-
tended by Test Act, 103; modified
by Glorious Revolution, 115-5;
Tory nostalgia for, 125; suspension
of penalties of, after 1714, 127-8;
repeal of Corporation Act (1828),
214, 216

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of,

minister of Charles II, 100-1, 131

Clement VIII, Pope, and marriage of

Henry VIII, 20-1.

Cobden, Richard, and Anti-Corn-
Law League, 227; and laissez faire,
256; mentioned, 275
Coke, Sir Edward, Chief Justice, and

James I, 56, 70

Colonies, Elizabethan attitude toward,
47; Jacobean emigration to, 58-9;
and CromweHian imperialism, 90,
91-2; British acquisitions in second
Dutch War, 101, and in Treaty of
Utrecht, 121; and AngJo-French
rivalry in eighteenth century, 133,
136, 138-43; British seizure of Eu-
ropean, in Napoleonic Wars, 196,
203; Victorian schools of thought
about, 2314; luneteenthrcentary
European race for, 250, 2TTO, 275-6,
287; British acquisitions in Ver-
sailles settlement, 332, 333, 885,
336. See also Revolution, American;
Dominions; Imperialism
Commerce, in early sixteenth century,
-4; promotion of, by Henry VII,
15; under Elizabeth, 41, 47-8; and
Cromwell's wars, 90-2, 132^3; and
War of Spanish Succession, 119;
120; and Anglo-Scottish friction,
123- and Spanish-American market,
121,' 13S-5, 195, 208, 209; cdbnil,
and American Revohrtioii, 148-60;
expansion of, in eigbteentfi century,
162, 171; and Vienna settlement,
203; expansion of, and Crimean
War, 240

Index

De Valera, Eamon, and Irish Free
State, 345; and Republic of Eire,
355
Diggers, in Puritan Revolution, 93,

95

Disraeli, Benjamin, political philoso-
phy of, and renascence of Toryism,
245-52, 265; and second Reform
Bill, 253-4; and imperialism, 256-
7, 278, 286, 312-3; and domestic
reforms, 259-60; and Victoria, 260;
and Home Rule, 263; imperial and
foreign policy, 268, 278-82, 284-5,
354, 364; compared with Salisbury,
295; influence of, 268, 348; men-
tioned, 269, 305, 368
Dissenters, during Restoration, 100-1,
102-3, 106; and James n, 110; in
Glorious Revolution, 112, 113-5,
116; under Anne, 125, 126; and
Hanoverian accession, 127-8; in
nineteenth century, 180, 214. See
also Presbyterianism; Puritanism
Divine right, theory of, 51-2, 106
Dominions, British, genesis of, 231-5,
2778; economic competition with
Britain, 274, 350-1; Joseph Cham-
berlain and, 298-9; before and dur-
ing first World War, 323, 343-4; in
peace settlement, 332, 335, 336;
and League of Nations, 338; isola-
tionism in, 340, 352; and Anglo-
Japanese alliance, 342; Irish Free
State among, 345; and Statute of
Westminster, 346-7; in second
World War, 374, 379, 384; in con-
temporary world, 385. See also Aus-
tralia; Canada; Colonies; Common-
wealth of Nations, British; Eire;
New Zealand; Union of South Af-
rica

Drake, Sir Francis, and Spanish Ar-
mada, 43

Drang nach Osten, genesis of, 279-
80; development of, and first World
War, 301, 313, 315; Hitler's failure
to revive, 359

Dryden, John, quoted, 107-8, 114

Dual Alliance, in nineteenth century,
301-2, 305; and Schlieffen Plan,
316- British attitude toward, before
first World War, 317-8

Dual Monarchy: see Austria-Hungary

Dunbar, Battle of (1650), and its
effects, 88-9

Dunkirk, British withdrawal from,

Dunkirk (continued}

(1940), 369, 370; mentioned, 96,
377

Durham, John Lambton, Earl of, and
his Report on Canada, 234-5; men-
tioned, 346

Dutch War: first, (1652), 91; sec-
ond, (1665), 101-2; third, (1672),
102-3

East India Company, in eighteenth
century, 129, 133-4, 165-7, 172;
loss of commercial privileges, 222;
and Sepoy Mutiny, 2434

Edinburgh, Treaty of, ( 1560), 39-40

Education: British elementary, state
financing of, 222; Gladstone's re-
form of, 258, 260; Indian, 244

Edward VI, King of England, birth,
23; reign, 29-31

Edward VII, King of Great Britain,
accession, 295; and Entente Cor-
diale, 304; death, 310; mentioned,
354

Edward VHE, King of Great Britain,
accession and abdication, 354-5

Egypt, Napoleon's expedition to, 184-
5, 186, 188, 210, 282; and Greek
revolt, 210-1; nineteenth-century
French interests in, 243; Anglo-
French friction over, 270; British oc-
cupation of, 281-4; and reconquest
of Sudan, 288; and formation of En-
tente Cordiale, 304; in first World
War, 331; post-war nationalism in,
337, 361; in second World War,
371, 373, 376; mentioned, 190

Eire, creation of, 355; in second
World War, 374, 384, 385

Elgin, James Brace, Earl of, and
Canadian self-government, 235;
mentioned, 346

Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, and

Seven Years" War, 137, 141
Elizabeth, Queen of England, heiress
presumptive, 23, 31; character, 3&-
4, 38, 46; Church settlement, 34^5,
37-8, 54, 65-6, 71, 76; foreign pol-
icy, 38-^44; technique of governing,
50-1, 60-1; and ship money, 70;
mentioned, 159, 174
Enclosure movement, in Tudor period,
11, 22; under CharUs I, 60; in
eighteenth century, 171
Enlightenment, philosophy of, 145-6.
See also Rationalism

TO

Index

Huguenots, French, and Charles I
61-3, 67; and Louis XIV, lll|
mentioned, 37

Hundred Years' War, and effect upon
England, 4-5, 8; upon Scotland, 6

Hungary, in creation of Dual Mon-
archy (1867), 269-70; in settle-
ment of 1919, 334; and Hitler's
aggression, 363. See also Austria-
Hungary

Imperialism, of Cromwell, 88-92; in
Walpole era, 133-4; of elder Pitt,
139, 1401; and reform of colonial
system after 1763, 147-51; effect
of American Revolution upon, 163-
8; liberal opposition to, 220-1, 233-
4; transformation of, in early Vic-
torian era, 231-9, 278, 294; and
Disraeli, 246; in late nineteenth-
century Europe, 250, 269, 275, 301;
renascence of, in late-Victorian Brit-
ain, 255, 256-7, 268, 273, 275-6,
287, 291, 298-300, 355; in France,
270, 276, 282; in United States,
277; among Boers, 290, 294; and
Russian Revolution, 335; and con-
temporary Russian policy, 382

Independents, and New Model, 83;
opposition of, to English Presby-
terians, 84-6; government of, 86-
95; and Clarendon Code, 100-1

India, eighteenth-century British ex-
pansion in, 133-4, 138, 140, 141;
British policy toward, before 1793,
165-8; in Napoleonic era, 184, 190;
and Sepoy Mutiny, 24O-1, 243-4;
government of, after 1858, 244, 260,
283; before and during first World
War, 331, 344; in second World
War, 374; British withdrawal from,
384, 388. See also East India Com-
pany

Indulgence, Declaration of: see Dec-
laration of Indulgence

Instrument of Government (1653),
94

Iran: see Persia

Ireland, Tudor government of, 3, 5-6;
under Elizabeth, 44-5, 346; Jaco-
bean colonization, 57-8, 346; under
Stratford, 74; rebellion (1641), 78;
Cromwellian conquest and settle-
ment, 88, 92, 346; settlement after
Glorious Revolution, 115-6, 346;
during American Revolution, 163-5;

Ireland (continued)

during French Revolution and Na-
poleonic era, 183, 185-6; and enact-
ment of Catholic emancipation, 214-
6; famine in, and repeal of corn
law, 228, 229, 232; effects of Home
Rule crisis, 252, 255, 257, 260, 275-
6, 283, 286, and see Home Rule;
creation of Free State, 344-7, 351;
British naval bases in, 345, 355;
creation of Republic of Eire, 355,
and see Eire

Irish Free State: see Eire; Ireland
Ironsides, Cromwell's creation of, 83;

mentioned, 88
Isabella of Castile, mentioned, 13, 16,

18

Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 281-2, 283
Italy, commercial importance of, in
sixteenth century, 3; in War of
Spanish Succession, 119, 120, 121;
in Wars of French Revolution and
Napoleon, 181, 182, 190, 193, 195,
198; and Vienna settlement, 202,
204; rise of liberalism in, 205, 206,
208, 239; unification of, 239, 240,
242, 251, 269; Kingdom of, ( 1861 ),
269, 301; in first World War, 326,
331; and settlement of 1919, 335,
337, 340, 356; and origins of second
World War, 361-3; in second World
War, 369, 371, 372, 376, 377

Jacobinism, and Methodism, 179, 180;
and change in warfare, 182; and
nineteenth-century Continental lib-
eralism, 205; absence of, in French
Revolution of 1830, 217; compared
with commttnism, 356, 357

Jacobites, genesis of, 122; and rising
of 1715, 127; and Walpole s policy,
133; and rising of 1745-6, 136

James I, Kong of England (James VI
of Scotland), birth, 40; claim to
English throne, 46; character, 50-1,
60-1; Scottish background, 51-2,
72-3; ecclesiastical poKcy, 53-4, 65;
financial policy, 54-7; foreign pol-
icy, 59-60; and royal suspending
power, 102

James II, King of England, as Duke
of York, 104-6, 107-9; character,
109; reign, 109-12; in Ireland, 115;
championed in exile by Louis XIV,
116; death, 118; and Toryism, 122;
mentioned, 97, 123, 154, 320

XI

Index

Liberal Party (continued)

256, 266-8, 273, 284, 286, 312; re-
constructed after Gkdstone, 268,
299-300, 306; policies after 1906,
307-20, 348, 355, 386; and coali-
tion of first World War, 325, 345;
post-war extinction of, 348-9, 351.
See also Whig Party

Liberalism, economic, in younger
Pitt's ministry, 174-5; political, in
Restoration Europe, 205, 206, 207,
212; and Greek revolt, 211; and
Whiggism of 1830*s, 217-25; and
corn-law crisis, 225-8, 229-30; and
early- Victorian imperialism, 231-9,
278, 280; threats to, foreign and do-
mestic, 244-51, 271, 272; Glad-
stonian transformation of, 252-4,
256, 257, 263, 268, 286; subsequent
transformation of, 268, 299-300;
and Fabianism, 297; and return of
protection, 350, 351; and contem-
porary British socialism, 386

Lilburne, John, Leveller leader, 93-4

Lloyd George, Chancellor of Excheq-
uer^, 309-11; in first World War,
323, 325, 330, 348; at Paris Con-
ference, 333, 336; and Irish Free
State, 345; fall of, 347, 348; men-
tioned, 218

Localism, and character of Tudor local
government, 9, 50; effect on Charles
Fs personal rule, 68-9, 70, 80; in
opposition to Cromwell's regime, 94,
and to James II's, 110; triumph in
Glorious Revolution, 113, 116; in
American colonies, 148, 150; un-
dermined by poor law of 1834,
223-4

Locarno, Treaties of> (1925), 340-1;
violated by Hitler, 362; mentioned,
381

Long Parliament: see Parliament,
Long

Lords, House of: see House of Lords

Louis XIEI, King of France, men-
tioned, 61

Louis XIV, King of France, his sys-
tem, 98; relations with Charles H,
99, 101-4, 106, 107-9, with James
II, 109, 111-2; wars against Eng-
land, 116-22; champion of James
"m," 116, 118, 126; mentioned,
182, 201, 313, 320, 381

Louis XV, King of France, mentioned,
81, 140

Louis-Philippe, Ebg of France, re-
gime of, 217, 239-40

Louisburg, captured from French and
restored (1748), 136; recaptured,
140

Louisiana, transferred from France to
Spain (1763), 141; weakness of
Spanish control, 162; in Napoleonic
era, 190.

Low Countries, acquired by Philip II,
32-3; revolt of, 40-1, 42; in Vienna
settlement, 204; nineteenth-century
British policy toward, 204, 274; in
second World War, 368-9, 378;
mentioned, 207. See also Belgium;
Holland; Netherlands

Loyalists, in American Revolution, 156

Luftwaffe, before second World War,
359, 361, 364, 366-7; in Battle of
Britain, 369, 371; and Crete, 373,
389; and allied air offensive, 377

Luther, Martin, quoted, 26; men-
tioned, 20

MacDonald, Ramsay, and formation
of National Government, 350; res-
ignation, 354; and Nazi menace,
360

Machiavelli, Nicolo, mentioned, 34,
64, 272, 291

Maginot Line, began by France, 340,
362; in Anglo-French strategy, 365,
367; and fall of France, 368-9

Magna Carta, mentioned, 55-6, 178

Mahan, Alfred T., and German naval
expansion, 302

Mahdi, the, and Sudanese rebellion,
283-4, 286; followers of, 287-8

Majuba Hffl, Battle of, ( 1881), 285

Malta, acquired by Britain in Napole-
onic Wars, 189, 196, 204

Maoris, friction of New Zealand set-
tlers with, 2S-S, 277

Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry Vili,
and Stuart marriage, 16

Maria Theresa, accession to Austrian
throne, 134 135; duel with Prussia,
135-7; mentioned, 202

Marlboraagfc, John Churchill, Duke
of, in War of Spanish Succession,
12CK21; relations with Tories and
Whigs, 122-3, 125; compared with
George Washington, 159, and witii
Wellington, 197

Marne, Battle of, (1914), 321, 322,
331; mentioned, 369, 372, 373.

XU1

Index

Nationalism, and Anglo-Scottish fric-
tion, 123-4; Irish, and Grattan, 164
and O'Connell, 215; in Napoleonic
Europe, 189-90, 196-7; in Restora-
tion Europe, 204-5, 210, 334; in
British dominions, 234, 344; in In-
dia, 244, 344, 380, 384; in late-
Victorian Britain, 267, 268, 272; in
world of late nineteenth century
269, 271, 274, 275, 279, 282; among
Boers, 285, 292, 343; in Balkans,
314-5; after first World War, 334,
335, 337; and rise of dictatorships,
356-7, 358-9

Navarino, Battle of, (1827), 211

Navigation Act, and first Dutch War
91; liberalized (1822^5), 214; re^
pealed, 230

Navy, British: see Royal Navy

Navy, Dutch, in seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, 91, 117; in
Wars of French Revolution and
Napoleon, 183

Navy, French, in seventeenth century,
104, 117; in eighteenth century,
119, 120-2, 135-6, 138, 140, 142,
159-61; in Wars of French Revolu-
tion and Napoleon, 183, 184^5,
1913; in later ninetenth century,
211, 241-2, 282; in twentieth cen-
tury, 318, 370

Navy, German, and first World War,
302-3, 316, 318, 327-8; in second
World War, 359, 370. See also
Blockade, German

Navy, Japanese, and British alliance,
303, 326; and Washington treaties,
341-2; and second World War, 371,
374-6, 378

Navy, Spanish, under Philip II: see
Armada; in eighteenth century, 119,
120-2, 135, 160; in Wars of French
Revolution and Napoleon, 183,
191-2

Navy, United States, and first World
War, 303, 329, 330; and Washing-
ton treaties, 341-2; and second
World War, 370-1, 373, 374, 375-
6, 377, 384

Nazism, incomprehensible to British,
357, 358-9, 360; and second World
War: see Germany; and blitzkrieg,
368

Nelson, Horatio, Viscount, at Cape St.
Vincent, 183; at the Nile, 184; at
Copenhagen, 189; and Trafalgar

Nelson, Horatio (continued)

~ ^e with

Jelhcoe 328; mentioned, 193, 197

Netherlands, Austrian, acquired in
1713, 121; menaced by France in
eighteenth century, 134, 136, 137-
8; in Wars of French Revolution
and Napoleon, 181, 182; surren-
dered in 1815, 20&-4, end see Bel-
gium. See oho Low Countries

Netherlands, Dutch, revok against
Philip II, 40-1, 42, 45, 159; Ameri-
can colonies of, 58; and Aa$o-
Dutch Wars: see Dutch Wars; and
Louis XIVs designs, 101-2, 107,
117; naval decline of, 117; in War
of Spanish Succession, 119, 121; in
American Revolution, 160; in Wars
of French Revolution and Napoleon,
181, 182, 190, 193; in Vienna set-
tlement, 203-4, and see Holland;
mentioned, 314. See also Low
Countries

Netherlands, Spanish, revolt against
Philip H, 40-1; attacked by Louis
XIV, 101-2, 118-9; transferred to
Austria in 1713, 121, and see Neth-
erlands, Austrian. See also Belgium;
Low Countries

Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-HoBes t
Duke of, and elder Pitt, 138, 141

Newfoundland, acquired by Britain
(1713), 121; French fishing rights
off, 141-2, 304; and Dominion of
Canada, 235

New York, acquired by Britain
(1667), 101; in American Revolu-
tion, 158, 160

New Zealand, settled, 232-3; and
Maori crisis, 277-8; in Boer War,
294; in first World War, 324, 343;
in second World War, 374, 379,
384,385

Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia, and
Greek revolt, 211-12; and Crimean
War, 241-2

Nile, Batue of, (1798), 184, 188, 193

Nile Valley, Anglo-French friction
over, 270, 284; British expansion
in: see Egypt; Sudan; and forma-
tion of Entente Cordiale, 304; and
Ethiopian crisis, 3612; mentioned,
184,257

Nonconformists: see Dissenters

Norman Conquest: of England, 4; of
Ireland, 5

Index

Persia (Iran) (continued)

in second World War, 375; and
contemporary Anglo-Russian fric-
tion, 383

Petition of Right (1628), 63, 67
Petrine supremacy, theory of, 25-6, 27
Philip H, King of Spain (Philip I of
England), inheritance and marriage
of, 31-2, 33; relations with Eliza-
bethan England, Scotland, and Ire-
land, 38-9, 40-4, 45; compared with
Stalin, 382; mentioned, 192
Philip V, King of Spain, in War of

Spanish Succession, 118, 120, 121
Philippines, before and during second
World War, 341-2, 371, 374, 378
Pitt, William, the elder: see Chatham
Pitt, William, the younger, beginning
of ministry, 168-9; and reform,
175-6, 180; wartime ministry, 181-
8, 193-4; quoted, 392; mentioned,
214, 245, 368

Poland, early partitions of, 202-3; re-
constituted after first World War,
334, 335, 336; French alliance with,
340; and outbreak of second World
War, 365-6; in second World War,
367, 381; mentioned, 352, 374
Polish Corridor, created (1919), 334;
and German revisionism, 335; and
outbreak of second World War,
366

Poor relief, and Industrial Revolution,

173-4, 178; reform of, (1834),

222-4; and unemployment of

1930's, 350, 352-3

Popish Plot (1678), 107-8; men-

tioned, 114

Portugal, in early sixteenth century,
4, 48; in War of Spanish Succes-
sion, 120; in Napoleonic era, 193,
19&-7
Potato, and Irish discontent, 215,

228-9

Predestination, theory of, 36

Presbyterianism, in Scotland, 37 y 51-2,

88-9, 123; in England, 53, 84-6,

96 100-1, 113; in Ulster, 58, 115-

6, 164, 185-6, 188, 215. See <dso

Dissenters

Prime minister, genesis of oince or,

131
Primogeniture, social effects of, 8-9.

128

Protection, economic, and Pitts ; com-
mercial treaty with France (1786)

Protection (continued)

174-5; of domestic grain: see com
law; and classical liberalism, 220;
and Disraeli's imperialism, 246; and
fair trade movement, 274-5; Joseph
Chamberlain's program for, 298-
300, 306, 309; triumph of, in Brit-
ain of 1930's, 348-9, 350, and ef-
fects, 350-1, 352-3, 355
Protectorate, Cromwellian, 94-5
Protestantism, origins of, 20, 26-8;
in reign of Edward VI, 30-1, 35-6;
in reign of Mary, 32-3* 36; in
Elizabethan Church, 34-8; and
divine right, 51-2; and EngKsh
foreign policy, 59, 65, 91, 105; and
Laudian movement, 65-6, 71;
and eighteenth-century enlighten-
ment, 146
Prussia, East, and origins of second

World War, 334, 335, 366
Prussia, eighteenth-century rivalry
with Austria, 134-8, 139-42; in
Wars of French Revolution and
Napoleon, 176, 181, 182, 189, 193,
199-200; in Vienna settlement, 202-
4, 206; and Revolution of 1848,
239; and Danish War (1864), 251;
and unification of Germany, 269,
273, 321, and see Germany; and
German nationalism, 271; as guar-
antor of Belgium neutrality, 316;
mentioned, 159

Puritanism, in Elizabethan Church,
36-8, 45, 46; under James I, 53-4;
under Charles I, 64, 65-6, 71, 72;
characteristics of, in first Civil War,
81, S2r-Q; Lflbnrne as representa-
tive of, 93-4; and Clarendon Code,
100-1; and Restoration Whigs* 106;
and nmeteentib-century liberalism,
219. See also Dissenters

Quiberon Bay, Battle of, (1759), 140

Radicalism, Ensgish, among Independ-
ents, 85, 93-4; prevention of, in
Glorious Revolution, 112; and
American Revolution, 155, 169; and
French Revolution, 176-8, 179,
180-1- among Liberals of 186Qfs,
253, aid of 1880's, 267, 268; among
Chamberlain's Unionists, 298

Railroads, and British industrializa-
tion, 173; and inland expansion of
dominions, 238; and unification of

XVT1

Index

Roosevelt, President Franklin, and
American sea power in second
World War, 370-1, 373
Roses, Wars of the, effects of, 5, 8;

and Tudor accession, 7
Roundheads, composition of, in first
Civil War, 79-80, 81-2; mentioned,
112

Royal Air Force, and retreat from
Dunkirk, 369; and Battle of Brit-
ain, 369, 371; and allied counter-
offensive, 376-7, 381
Royal Navy, Elizabethan, 41-3, 47,
48-9; early Stuart, 58-9, 70; Pur-
itan, 89-92, 97; in wars against
Louis XIV, 117, 119, 120-2; and
eighteenth-century patronage, 130,
151; in wars of mid-eighteenth
century, 135-6, 137-41, 142; in
American Revolution, 149, 156,
158-61; and infant United States,
162-3; in Wars of French Revolu-
tion and Napoleon, 181-2, 182-4,
188-9, 191-3, 194r-5, 197-8; in
crisis of 1823, 209-10; and mid-Vic-
torian empire, 231; and Crimean
War, 240, 241-2, 243; in late-Victo-
rian era, 274, 278, 288, 293; and
German competition, 302-3, 305,
308, 316; and Anglo-French agree-
ment of 1912, 318, 320-1; in first
World War, 324, 325-8, 32^-32;
provisions for, in post-war settle-
ment, 332, 336; and Washington
treaties, 341-2, 347, 351; and Irish
bases, 345, 355; and Ethiopian
crisis, 362-3; and British strategy
for second World War, 365; in sec-
ond World War, 367, 368, 369,
370-1, 372, 374, 375-6, 377, 384,
389

Rumania, in Crimean War, 241, 242;
in Treaty of San Stefano, 278; in
Treaty of Berlin, 279; in Peace of
Paris (1919), 334; French alliance
with, 340; in second World War,
*V71

Rump Parliament: see Parliament,

Rump - T

Rupert, Prince, nephew of Charles I,

as cavalry leader, 82; at sea, 90
Russell, Lord John, (later Earl Rus-
sell), and repeal of com law, 225;
Prime Minister, 252-3
Russia, in Seven Years' War, 137, 141;
in Wars of French Revolution and

Russia (continued)
Napoleon, 188, 189, 193, 198-3; in
Vienna settlement, 202-4, 206; and
Greek revolt, 210-2; and Crimean
War, 239, 240-2, 244; and Sepoy
Mutiny, 243; and Polish revolt
(1863), 251; and Balkans, 270,
278-80, 284, 286, 293; and forma-
tion of Triple Entente, 300, 301;
rivalry with Japan, 303, 304, 305,
313; and origins of first World
War, 312-6, 317, 319; in first
World War, 321, 322, 324, 328,
374; Revolution (1917), 330; in
peace settlement, 334, S35, 336,
337, 358; and international com-
munism, 356-7; and origins of sec-
ond World War, 359, 361, 363,
365-6; and partition of Poland
(1939), 367, 371; in second World
War, 372-4, 375-6, 378; in con-
temporary world, 380, 381-2, 387,
390-3

Russo-German Pact (1939), 066;
mentioned, 199

St. Vincent, John Jervis, Earl of, naval
victory (1797), 183; First Lord of
Admiralty, 191; compared with
Jellicoe, 328

Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-CecS,
Marquis of, and Irish question, 265;
and Joseph Chamberlain, 268, 295-
6; and Boer War, 202; retirement,
295-6,298

San Stefano, Treaty o, ( 1878), 278,
279; mentioned, 305

Saratoga, Battle of, (1777), and effect
on American Revolution, 158-O

Sardinia, Kingdom of, in Wars of
French Revolution and Napoleon,
181, 190; and Vienna settlement,
204; and unification of Italy: tee
Italy

Savoy, Kingdom of, see Sardinia

Schlieffen Plan, genesis of, 316; op-
eration and collapse of, (1914),
319-21; apparent repetition of,
(1940},368-9

Science, and Restoration society, 115;
and eighteenth-century enlighten-
ment, 145, 146, 147; and mid-Vic-
torian optimism, 230; and late-Vic-
torian imperialism, 275

Scodand, relations of, with Todor
England, 6^ 16> 18, 23, 39-40, and

XIX

Index

Sudan, French designs on, 270, 284-
British policy toward, 283-4, 285-1
6, 287-8; mentioned, 304

Suez, British strategic interest in, 210
281, 284; Canal opened, 278, 282,-
and Drang nach Osten, 315; and
Ethiopian crisis, 361-2; in second
World War, 370, 372, 373

Tanks, in first World War, 324-5, 331;
and blitzkrieg of second World
War, 367-8

Tariffs: see Protection

Taxation, early nature of, 10; under
Henry VII, 15-6; under Henry
VIII, 18; under James I, 54r-5; un-
der Charles I, 62, 69-70, 74; under
Anne, 125; and Walpole*s policy,
133; and American Revolution, 143,
149-50, 153, 155, 157-8; and fran-
chise of 1832, 218; and poor law
of 1834, 223; and Victorian im-
perialism, 233-4; Chamberlain's
proposal for, (1885), 267; in South
African Republic, 290-1; by Liberal
government after 1906, 306-9, 347;
and party programs of 1920's, 347,
386; social effects of, 353; and con-
temporary British socialism, 386

Tennyson, Alfred, Baron, quoted,
230

Test Act passed (1673), 103; defied
by James H, 110; modified by Glori-
ous Revolution, 113-5; evaded un-
der Anne, 125; suspended against
dissenters after 1714, 128; re-
pealed (1828), 214, 216

Theocracy, in Scotland, 51

Thirty-Nine Articles, of Elizabethan
Church, 35, 37

Thirty Years* War (1618), and Eng-
lish wool trade, 57; and English
colonization in America, 58-9; Eng-
lish policy toward, 59-60, 61-2, 68;
and rise of France, 98

Tilsit, Peace of, (1807), 193, 198

Toleration in religion, in reign of Ed-
ward VI, 30-1; attempted by In-
dependents, 84, 96, 113; partially
secured by Toleration Act, 113-5;
unpopular in rural England, 125;
. established after 1714, 127-8; men-
tioned, 268

Torres Vedras, Lines of, defended by
Wellington (1810), 197, 199

Tory Party, in reign of Charles H,

Tory Party (continued)

105-9; of James H, 110-1, 320; and
y****!** * of Glorious Revolution,
112-3, 116, 122-3, 124-7; ate
Hanoverian accession, 132, 14l f
251; renascence under younger
Pitt, 169-70, 175-6, 177-8; opposi-
tion to reform movement, 201, 212-
4, 357; encouragement of Conti-
nental liberals, 207-9, 210-2; do-
mestic policies after 1815 (Tory
Reaction"), 212-4, 215-6; and first
.Reform Bill, 216-9, 221-2, 256;
and repeal of com law, 226-9, 265,-
renascence after 1846, 218, 224,
225, 239, 244, 245-9, 253-4, 354;
and Tory democracy, 249-51, 298;
after second Reform Bill (1867):
see Conservative Party

Tory Reaction: see Tory Party, domes-
tic policies after 1815

Trade, acts of, 148-9, and see Com-
merce; Navigation Act

Trade unions, in early nineteenth cen-
tury, 214, 220; and Tory democ-
racy, 248; legalized by Gladstone
and Disraeli, 259, 260; changing
character of, in Salisbury era, 296-
8; and protection, 299; Liberal
legislation for, after 1906, 307-8;
and Labour Party, 349-50

Trafalgar, Battle of, (1805), 192-3

Transvaal, settled by Boers, 236;
granted autonomy (1852), 237;
and first Boer War, 284r-6, 287;
after 1881: see South African Re-
public

Treaties: see Aix-la-CbapeDe, Treaty
of, (1748); Alliances; Amiens,
Peace of, (1802); Berlin, Congress
and Treaty of, (1878); Brest-Li-
tovsk, Treaty of, (1918); Edin-
burgh, TVeaty of, (1500); Locarno,
Treaties of, (1925); Munich, Peace
of, (1938); Paris, Peace of, (1763;
1856; 1919); San Stefano, Treaty
of, (1878); Tilsit, Pteace of,
(1807); Utrecht, Treaty of, (1713);
Vereeniging, Treaty of, (1902);
Versailles, Treaty of, (1783;
1919); Vienna, Congress and
Treaty of, (1815); Washington,
Conference and naval treaties of,
(1922)

Trent, Council of, (1545), and Catfco-
Hc Reformation, 32

XXI

Index

Walpole, Sir Robert, constitutional im-
portance of, 181; policies, 133, 134-
5; compared with. Neville Chamber-
lain, 360; mentioned, 175, 179, 187
War of 1812, 162, 195-6, 197-8;

mentioned, 380

Warfare, effect of French Revolution
on, 182; significance for Britain of
recent developments in, 388-91
Wars: see Austria Succession, War of
the, (1740); Boer War (1880;
1899); Civil War; Crimean War
(1854); Dutch War (1652; 1665;
1672); Franco-Prussian War
(1870); Hundred Years* War; Jen-
kins's Ear, War of, (1739); League
of Augsburg, War of the, (1688);
Peninsular War (1808); Revolu-
tion, American, War of the; Revolu-
tion, French, Wars of the, and Na-
poleon; Roses, Wars of the; Seven
Years' War (1756); Spanish Suc-
cession, War of the, (1702); Thirty
Years' War (1618); War of 1812;
World War (1914; 1939)
Washington Conference and naval
treaties (1921-2), background and
implications, 341-2, 351
Washington, George, in War of Amer-
ican Revolution, 159
Waterloo, Battle of, (1815), 199-201
Wellesley, Sir Arthur: see Wellington
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke
of, in Peninsular War, 197; in Wat-
erloo campaign, 199-200; in post-
war politics, 201; at Congress of
Verona, 206; Prime Minister, 211-
2, 214, 215, 216-7; and first Re-
form Bill, 221, 247, 252; and corn
law crisis, 229; compared with
Salisbury 295

Wentworth, Peter, Elizabethan Pun-
tan, 37, 66

Wentworth, Thomas: see Strafford
Wesley, Charles and John, and Meth-
odism, 179-80
West Indies: see Caribbean
Westminster, Statute of, (1932), 346,

347 > 355 f ^ i TT

Whig Party, in reign of Charles II,

105-9, and of James II, 110-1, 320;
and settlement of Glorious Revolu-
tion, 112-4, 122-3, 124-7, 205;
after Hanoverian accession, ISA
133,. 141, 144, 174, 368; and
George IlTs experiment, 151-5,
157; under younger Pitt, 168, 169-

70, 176; during Tory Reaction, 214,
215; and triumph of liberalism,
216-38, 247, 256; tradition of, in
late nineteenth century, 267-8, 272.
See also Liberal Party
Whitefield, George, Methodist leader,

179

William H, German Emperor, and
telegram to Kruger, 292; and Ma-
han, 302; at Tangier, 305; and
crisis of 1914, 319; flight to Hol-
land, 331, 332; mentioned, 301, 313,
329, 358, 359

William ILL, King of England, and
clpfnrn to English throne, 1057; ac-
cession, 1112; and Toleration Act,
113; in Ireland, 115-6; dealings
with Louis XIV, 116-20; character,
119; relations with Tories, 122;
death, 119-20; mentioned, 123, 235
William IV, King of Great Britain,
and first Reform Bill, 216-7, 221;
death, 225

Wilson, President Woodrow, in first
World War, 328-30; at Paris Con-
ference, 332-3, 334, 339; quoted,
374
Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, and Henry

VIE, 17-8, 21, 50
Wool trade, in Tudor period, 9, 11;
and revolt of Netherlands, 41; and
James I, 57; and Charles I, 69; and
British treatment of Ireland after
1690, 116; and Industrial Revolu-
tion, 171, 172
Worcester, Battle of, (1651), 89;

flight of Charles II from, 99
World War: first (1914), origins of,
205, 280, 312-20, and Irish crisis,
311-2, 345, course of, 320-32, 389,
settlement following, 332-7, and
British dominions, 323, 343-4, ef-
fects of, on Britain, 346, 347, 853,
358, 359, 385, and stimulus to na-
tionalism, 334, 356, and strategy of
second World War, 367-8, men-
tioned, 377, 379; second (1939),
origins of, 330, 356-66, course of,
366-78, effects of, on English-speak-
ing peoples, 379-80, 384, effects of,
on Britain, 384-5

Yorktown, surrender of CorawaHis at t
(1781), 151, 160-1

Zulus, danger from, to white settiers
in South Africa, 234, 284-5

XX111

Introduction

early Stuarts and Cromwell receive as much attention as the whole
Tudor era, or as the hundred years after the Restoration. The chron-
ological pace of the book is slower in the nineteenth century than
in the eighteenth, and slower still in the twentieth, because the story
becomes more relevant as it approaches our time.

It also becomes more difficult to interpret. The characters in its
most recent chapters have not yet entered what Lord Curzon called
"the cold dissecting chamber of history" where historians, he
might have added, perform their post-mortems under the lamp of
hindsight. Causes are harder to discern in the immediate than in the
more distant past, and when it comes to results to describing how
the causes will work into the future the historian has nothing to
say as historian. If the study of the past impels him to look ahead,
he sees no more clearly than any other observer of the unknown.
But I cannot help trying to look, and in my final pages I have con-
sciously departed from the historian's role to advance some tentative
conclusions about the crisis into which we are moving.

One ingredient of the crisis, and one that particularly concerns
the United States, is the decline in Britain's position. The troubles of
the present Labour government are the result not of socialism, but
of history: the currents of change that produced the Victorian Pax
Britannica have now ended it, and to blame the ending on a partic-
ular regime is to confuse effects with causes. Confusion befuddles
American thinking about Britain at a time when clear thinking is
vital. Since the first settlement at Jamestown, American history has
been intimately associated with British. For a time after 1783 the
association was hidden, but in the twentieth century it has become
increasingly evident as British power has ebbed. I believe that we
have now reached the point where the survival of western civiliza-
tion depends in large measure on the closeness of Anglo-American
collaboration. Collaboration depends in turn upon mutual under-
standing, and understanding upon a sense of perspective a sense
of forces -working through time to make the two nations what they
are. History, if it cannot help to provide this perspective, is the salt
of events that has lost its savor.

For this reason the writing of interpretative history is needed. But
it is a dangerous occupation. In the first place its results cannot be
documented according to the rigid standards of the profession. As
soon as a writer tries to go beyond what facts meant for the men

viii

Contents

CHAPTER FOUR: THE DEFENSIVE AGAINST
REVOLUTION
1763-1815

I Rationalism and Reform 145

II The Emergence of the King 151

III Civil War in the Empire 156

IV The Repercussions of Defeat 161
V Economic Revolution 1 '

VI War against the French Revolution 176

VII Crisis in Ireland 185

VIII Victory at Sea 188

IX Victory on Land 193

X The Aftermath 200

CHAPTER FIVE: REVOLUTION BY CONSENT
1815-1867

I The Vienna Settlement 202

II Great Britain and the Concert of Europe 205

III The Genesis of Reform 212

IV Liberalism and the Reform Bill 217
V The Fruits of Liberalism 222

VI Liberalism and the Empire 230

VII Threats to Liberalism 238

VIII The New Toryism 245

IX The Beginning of Democracy 251

CHAPTER SIX: THE VICTORIAN TWILIGHT

1867-1906

I Major Themes 255

H Domestic Reform 257

III The Irish Question 261

IV The New Europe 268
V The Renascence of Imperialism 276

xii

Star of Empire

Isles were far removed from this commerce, and its main rewards
were denied to British merchants by the facts of geography supple-
mented by the sea power of Spain and Portugal. The lucrative if less
important trade routes of the Baltic were also denied to them by the
strength of the Hanseatic League. The only possible outlet for ex-
pansion was westward into the Atlantic, where the gains were at
best problematical and the dangers obvious. The British peoples
seemed confined by nature to the economic periphery of Europe.

In 1500 they were also on its cultural periphery. Their develop-
ment varied in direct proportion to their nearness to the Continent:
the English, at least politically, were far more mature than the Scots,
Welsh, or Irish, and the English of the southeastern counties were
generations ahead of those in the north and west. But even the most
civilized segments of society were behind the times by Continental
standards. The Renaissance, germinating in fifteenth-century Italy,
had spread northward into France and westward into the Iberian
peninsula; as yet it had scarcely crossed the Channel. A great part
of the reason lies in political developments that had cut England off
from Europe, turned her energies inward, dammed them up, and so
prepared the way for their subsequent outburst overseas. England's
past lay in Europe; her future lay in all the other continents.

During the Middle Ages England and France had grown toward
nationhood by struggling with each other. The struggle had its roots
in the Norman Conquest, whereby the Duke of Normandy, the most
powerful vassal of the King of France, became in his own right king
of England. For almost four hundred years his descendants labored
to increase their possessions in France, and for a time they aimed at
the French throne itself. The climax of their efforts was the Hun-
dred Years' War; when it ended in 1453, nothing remained of their
great French holdings except the Channel port of Calais. Their suc-
cesses had been sometimes grandiose and always transient; their
failure was complete and final.

That failure was a landmark in English history. It ended the
dream of Continental expansion once and for all, and began an era
that was isolationist in the literal sense. For the next century and a
half the inhabitants of the British Isles developed as islanders, and
their expansion, when it came, reached almost every part of the
globe except Europe. They alone, among the great powers of Euro-
pean history, have had no major territorial ambitions on the Conti-

Star of Empire

primitive, and its force was attenuated by mere distance; the farther
an area was from the capital, the less susceptible it was to royal
control. This factor operated in the border regions of England itself,
and far more strongly in the hills of Connaught. The only basis for
effective Tudor rule in Ireland was English armies, which were de-
pleted by wholesale desertions on the journey and could not be in-
creased without a prohibitive drain on the treasury. The Pale was
therefore a liability. It caused a dispersion of the scanty power avail-
able to the Tudors without bringing them any compensating
advantage.

Their power was barely adequate for other demands made upon
it nearer home. The small northern kingdom of Scotland had been
a problem and a temptation for English monarchs since the shadowy
days of Macbeth and Malcolm. The Scots hated the English as
much as the Irish did, and had resisted English aggression far more
successfully. They could combine in moments of crisis, as the Irish
could not, and they had a source of help abroad. Medieval English
kings had twice reduced Scotland to the status of a fief, but she had
twice freed herself. The liberation on the field of Bannockburn in
1314 proved to be final, because soon afterward the English turned
their backs on the Scots to follow the will-o'-the-wisp of conquering
France in the Hundred Years* War.

The Scots used their opportunity to consolidate a working ar-
rangement with France, which endured as a political tie until 1560.
It was a mariage de convenance, common in the power politics of
any age, and it increased the difficulties of the English in their
French wars by creating a Scottish threat from behind. It was also
dangerous for the Scots. Their land had been divided by geography
and history into two parts, the Celtic highlands of the north and the
Teutonic lowlands, and the center of political power had long been
in the latter, exposed to the invasion of both English armies and
English culture; now the magnetism of French ideas was being felt
with increasing strength, and it seemed that Scotland might save
herself from England only to become an appanage of France. For
the Scots that possibility, however unwelcome, might be the lesser
of two evils. For the English it threatened disaster.

The problem of the fourth British people, the Welsh, was already
well on the way to settlement. The English conquest of Wales in
the thirteenth century had proved more enduring than similar ven-

Star of Empire

military less than their Continental neighbors, and their feudalism
had developed no such warrior caste as in France or Germany. The
profoundly civilian character of their society, in other words, de-
rived at bottom from geography.

The preceding century of warfare had threatened to make a seri-
ous alteration. During the Hundred Years* War the old feudality, a
poor weapon for fighting abroad, had been largely superseded by a
new nobility of the sword. Almost as soon as the fighting in France
had ended, fighting in England had begun; the mercenary captains
had supported one or the other claimant to the throne, and many of
them had been eliminated in the battles and proscriptions of the
Wars of the Roses. At the same time the people at large had learned
to think of an armed nobility as synonymous with rapine and op-
pression. The nobles had acquired much the same reputation as their
modern prototype, the large-scale gangster, and the rest of society
was as eager to be quit of them. The monarchy, on the other hand,
had been strengthened by the wars. It was immortal, unlike the mon-
arch, and with the victory of first one faction, then the other, the
royal treasury had gained by confiscation much of the land and
wealth of the vanquished. The bulk of the nation, furthermore,
looked to the throne for relief from the curse of the military, and a
tacit alliance of king and people against the nobility was taking
form.

^People" is a confusing word at any time, and particularly so
when applied to Tudor England. The great mass of the people
counted for next to nothing in national affairs; only a small minor-
ity had the wherewithal for political influence. The aristocrats were
the most conspicuous members of this minority, but far from the
most numerous. Below them was the middle class of town and
country: the burgesses, who ranged from small shopkeepers to mer-
chant princes; the gentry, who owned much of the land and had it
cultivated for them. These two groups are worth some attention,
because they were the most important constituents of English soci-
ety for centuries to come.

Neither the gentry nor the burgesses were a closed group. A fam-
ily of yeomen farmers might achieve gentility within a few genera-
tions by acquiring enough wealth to emancipate them from the
working of their land. The aristocracy, on the other side, was con-
stantly adding new blood to the gentry because of the law of primo-

8

Star of Empire

England were the gentry and burgesses, and their interests were
mirrored in the House that they elected. The peers of the realm,
who sat by hereditary right in the House of Lords, had encouraged
the Lower House in its adolescence because it was amenable to their
influence; a merchant or a squire did not shake off his awe of the ti-
tled magnate in his locality when his neighbors sent him to West-
minster. For this reason, among others, the House of Commons had
thrived inconspicuously on the chaos of the fifteenth century. Its
members were often a flock of scared sheep, but the House as an
institution gained strength for the future. It was used to legalize
one factional victory after another; although the victories were eva-
nescent, the use was growing into a habit with great implications.

By 1485 the implications were not fully apparent. The House of
Commons had participated, as of right, in the making and unmak-
ing of kings; it had assumed control of a large part of the royal rev-
enue; it had tried unsuccessfully to encroach on the executive sphere
of policy-making. But in the modern sense there was no House of
Commons. The group of men who sat in St. Stephen's Chapel was at
most a debating society concerned with ways and means of peti-
tioning its betters crown and lords for redress of outstanding
grievances. The members had been thrown together hugger-mugger
by the chance of the last election; they did not know each other,
their betters, or the Londoners among whom they had to live, and
they had small desire to. Their attendance at Parliament still had
much of its medieval character, of a burden foisted upon them by
their neighbors through the electoral process. Their aim was to se-
cure the redress of a maximum of grievances in return for voting a
minimum of taxes, and to complete this bargain and go home as
quickly as possible. Shakespeare's later gibe at "the wavering com-
mons'* might equally well have been aimed at them: "their love lies
in their purses." x In their eyes a good session was a short one, and
a good king was one who governed for years without needing to
summon a parliament. If such a king did not create grievances or
require parliamentary subsidies on a large scale, the middle class
was more than willing to leave the mysteries of state in his hands,
and to see parliaments become few and far between. The House of
Commons, despite its privileges and potential power, was an expen-
sive luxury for those whom it represented and taxed. Whether or not

i Bichafd II, II, ii, 129-30.

10

Star of Empire

of Henry VII was that he should be a good businessman with an eye
for trade rather than for the Crown of France. If he satisfied them,
they would support him. If they supported him, his House would be
on firm foundations regardless of the grumblings of lawyers and

aristocrats.

The first prerequisite of a businessman-king in 1485 was that he
should re-establish public order. Trade, whether by sea, by river,
or by the narrow and muddy paths that were called the king's high-
ways, could not expand under the constant menace of pirates and
robbers, and civil war was a catastrophe for business. The middle
class therefore had economic as well as social reasons for demand-
ing that the king should enforce the king's peace.

The demand was universal. The demoralization of the preceding
period had bred a craving for strong government; the English had
reached one of those moments in the life of a people when order is
preferable to liberty. Order could not be despotism. The fate of
Richard III was an object lesson for his successors, and none of the
Tudors was a despot in the usual sense. Order meant rather an in-
creasing emphasis upon the Crown as executive, and upon the
means for exercising its authority within the amorphous limits of
the constitution. Beyond a point authority could not go, but the
point would be determined by practice rather than by law deter-
mined after the fact by a breakdown of the machinery of govern-
ment or by a successful rebellion. The power of the Tudors was lim-
ited by a nice calculation, revised from moment to moment, of what
the market would bear. If their power seems from a distance to have
been absolute, it is because no sovereigns of modern history have
been shrewder calculators.

Equal shrewdness, of a different sort, was needed to guide Eng-
lish foreign relations. Some members of the dynasty were adept at
working their way through the maze of European politics; others
were not. The winding path they took is no longer important in it-
self, but the problem confronting them is. While their difficulties
can be understood only in terms of their period, the essence of their
problem has remained from that day to this. It is at the core of Eng-
land's policy toward the states of Europe.

At the opening of the sixteenth century the House of Valois was
shaking the uneasy equilibrium of the Continent by attempting to

12

Star of Empire

states is at bottom an age of anarchy; in an anarchic -world the only
defense against aggression, though a poor one, is some form of bal-
ance of power.

English foreign policy has oscillated between intervention in Eu-
rope and isolation from it. Intervention was never complete until
the wars of the twentieth century; isolation was even less complete
because of the constant need to safeguard multifarious English
Continental interests, political and economic. When all exceptions
are made, however, it remains true that over the centuries English
attention has swung like a pendulum, now toward Europe and now
away from it: toward, when the European balance was upset; away,
when it was temporarily restored. The sixteenth century is an exam-
ple in point. For its first six decades the Continent was absorbed by
the struggle between France and the Austro-Spanish power of the
Hapsburgs. England was not fundamentally involved because her
small weight was not needed, and the occasional involvements into
which her sovereigns forced her were neither deep nor lasting. Then
France was torn apart by civil wars, from the 1560's to the 1590's,
and the Spain of Philip II threatened to bestride the world. Eng-
land, reluctantly but inevitably, was drawn into a fight for life
against the colossus drawn partly for reasons of religion and trade,
but also because the balance of power had been destroyed, By 1600
the fight was over. Spain had made and lost her bid for hegemony,
France had recovered her strength, Europe was again in equilib-
rium, and England was at the beginning of another sixty years of
isolation.

So much for the Tudor setting. The England of which Henry VII
possessed himself was far from being a great power by the stand-
ards of Paris, Madrid, or Vienna. A kingdom of Great Britain, con-
trol of tie sea lanes, a British empire overseas these were far in
the future. But there were sources of power in the geography of
England, both in relation to the rest of the Islands and to continen-
tal Europe; in English society and government; in English economy
and in the hardy class that dominated it. These seeds of greatness
would not thrive by themselves; they needed astute and laborious
tending. The middle class could not tend them because it lacked the
constitutional means to take the initiative and the political maturity
to desire it. The nobility could not tend them; its ineptitude had
been abundantly proved. Only one guardian was left, the Crown.

14

Star of Empire

The wars were financial and political ventures rather than military;
they produced cash or concessions from one side for making war,
cash or concessions from the other for making peace. Such unroman-
tic conduct must have made several of his chivalric predecessors
turn over in their graves. But it was good business and good politics,
based on a sound estimate of the European situation: the struggle
between France and Spain gave England a high nuisance value, so
that Spain was willing to pay well for her assistance and France for
her neutrality. Henry managed to pocket both payments.

His marital policy was equally impartial and businesslike, al-
though its results were of far greater consequence. Eligible children
were chips in the game of statecraft, and the King had been blessed
with two sons and two daughters. One daughter, Mary, was too
young to be more than betrothed during the reign. The other, Mar-
garet, was married to the King of Scotland, James IV, of the House
of Stuart; she bore a son, through whom the Stuarts acquired a re-
sidual claim to the English throne. The claim would materialize
only if the male Tudor line died out, and Henry's two sons made
the chance appear slim. Their marriages were a matter of higher
politics and more immediate importance than those of their sisters,
and one to which Henry devoted all his gifts for diplomacy.

He was determined that the heir to the throne, Prince Arthur,
should find a Spanish bride among the daughters of Ferdinand and
Isabella. This match would further the prestige of the upstart Tu-
dor dynasty, but it was dangerous. Through it England might be
subordinated to Spain and drawn into her wars with France. Henry
was clever enough to cope with the danger while he lived; the diffi-
culties to come, with a dynasty half Tudor and half Spanish, Arthur
would have to cope with for himself. Negotiations were accordingly
opened with Madrid. They dragged on for years; the blood royal
might repent at leisure, but it rarely married in haste. At last a
proper dowry was settled upon the bride, Katharine of Aragon; she
reached England and was married in 1501. Five months later, just
when the King was negotiating the Scottish marriage as a counter-
weight to his Spanish commitment, Prince Arthur died.

Henry's diplomacy was not to be deflected. The marriage had
been fruitless: there were no children, and most of Katharine's
dowry was still unpaid. The King proposed as a substitute husband

16

Star of Empire

was elected. His dominions now virtually surrounded France, and
the most bitter phase of the Hapsburg-Valois struggle was begin-
ning. The wars broke out in 1521 and lasted for almost forty
years.

What was England's role to be? Wolsey seems to have glimpsed,
if faintly, what it should be to maintain the balance by aiding
whichever contestant was being worsted. Henry detested Francis
and dreamed of renewing the Hundred Years' War; he aligned him-
self with Charles. His assistance was not on a scale to evoke grati-
tude, for the English were apathetic; the House of Commons would
not vote taxes, and those levied without its consent could not be
collected. Henry was learning the limitations of his power. In 1525
his education was advanced by a French disaster in Italy, which left
Charles dominant in the peninsula and for the time master of Eu-
rope, with Francis his prisoner in Madrid. This shift in the scales of
power boded trouble for England.

By this time Henry had more than foreign affairs to trouble him.
The future of the dynasty was in danger. Katharine, despite fre-
quent pregnancies, had borne him only one child who lived, a girl
named Mary. Although girls were useful adjuncts to a royal house,
leaving the throne to a daughter invited disaster. England had not
been ruled by a woman since the twelfth century, and the precedent
was scarcely heartening: that Queen's accession had touched off two
decades of civil war. If Mary died, the nearest heir would be the
King of Scotland; his claim could be established only by another
civil war, backed in all likelihood by a French invasion. If Mary
gained and held the crown, she would have to marry in order to
carry on the line. But marry whom? Her only peer would be a for-
eign sovereign, and kings had a way of annexing their wives' do-
mains for their own side of the family. Within the past generation
single women had come to the thrones of Brittany, Burgundy, and
Castile; they had all married, and now Brittany was part of the
French kingdom, Burgundy and Castile parts of the Hapsburg
empire. Precedent, old or new, was not encouraging. The House of
Tudor had been established for only forty years, and Mary's acces-
sion might well be the signal for its disappearance.

This was the crux of Henry's problem. It was simple but impera-
tive; delay could only make it more dangerous. Katharine was not
going to produce a son, Mary's health was precarious, and at any

18

Star of Empire

tention to have his marriage declared null from the beginning. This
could be done in a number of ways, but all of them led sooner or
later to Rome. One pope had made the wedding possible, and only
another could undo it.

Henry's proposal - and with it the future of England - rested in
the hands of a wily and worldly scion of the Medici, Clement VII.
In normal times Clement would probably have been glad to oblige,
for Henry had been a good enough servant of the church to receive
the title of Defender of the Faith. But times were not normal; for
the papacy, as an institution, they were sadly out of joint. The re-
volt begun by Martin Luther ten years before was making alarming
headway in the Germanies. It could be suppressed, if at all, only by
the strongest exertion of papal authority, which must therefore be
preserved in its plenitude. Yet Henry was asking, at bottom, for its
curtailment. He wanted Clement to admit to the world that Julius
had exceeded the powers of his office - that there was a law of God
which even Christ's Vicar could not set aside. However well the is-
sue might be concealed in technicalities, there it was. If Clement
granted this request, he would be creating a breach in the medieval
edifice of the plenitude potestatis just when the heretics were storm-
ing it.

The times were also out of joint for the papacy as a secular power.
Military developments in Italy reduced Clement, as sovereign of the
Papal States, to greater and greater dependence on the Emperor,
who became in effect the power behind the papal throne. Katharine
was Charles's aunt, and the Pope felt that the moment was not op-
portune for reducing her to the status of a concubine. Henry's re-
quest could not be granted, in short, because of religious develop-
ments in the Germanies and military developments in Italy.

Clement, however, was not the man to say so. He evaded and de-
layed, while the King's patience wore thin. In 1529 it snapped, and
Henry decided to coerce the Pope by threats of secession. For this
purpose he took the momentous step of calling Parliament. Hitherto
he had followed the policy of his father, of having as little as possi-
ble to do with Parliament, and it seemed conceivable that the insti-
tution might wither away as the monarchy grew stronger. Now,
however, Henry broke with Tudor tradition. He summoned Parlia-
ment, took it into his confidence, and kept it in session for seven
years. By the time it was dissolved a revolution had been made in

20

Star of Empire

monasteries, priories, and nunneries owned roughly one-sixth of
the land of England. In return for this endowment the religious
houses performed no commensurate service, or at least none that ap-
pealed to a Tudor capitalist. To him prayers and meditations, unlike
lands, were of doubtful value to society; the monasteries were ineffi-
cient as educational and charitable agencies; their agrarian policy
was even more inefficient because they were unwilling to move
with the times and enclose their lands for sheepfolds. Would it not
be better, he argued, for all concerned or at least for all who mat-
teredif the regular clergy were eliminated, and their wealth
turned over to businessmen who knew how to put it to productive
use?

The answer was as obvious to the King as to his greediest subject.
Confiscation would be an easy move because the monks had virtu-
ally no political power. It would be a wise move because the regular
clergy had always been more closely tied to Rome than the secular
clergy. It would be an enormously lucrative move for the King, who
would possess himself of the land and sell what he chose. Last but
not least, confiscation would give the new church edifice a founda-
tion in the soil of England. Henry was about to make a momentous
change, and he had at hand one of the best methods of ensuring its
permanence the method subsequently used in France, in Russia,
in Mexico, of associating a revolution with a widespread transfer-
ence of land, and thereby creating a vested interest in preserving
the new order. Ruin of the monasteries would set the seal on royal
headship of the Church.

The rising star of Anne Boleyn thus became allied with the new
capitalism, and the setting star of Katharine with religious and eco-
nomic conservatism. Because the King and the majority of Parlia-
ment favored the change, the outcome was not in doubt. Katharine's
marriage was annulled in 1533 by an English ecclesiastical court,
shortly after Henry had married Anne. By the end of the following
year Parliament had completed the repudiation of papal authority,
had made the King the head of the Church, and had given him such
power against recalcitrants as none of his predecessors had ex-
ercised. The attack on the monasteries was begun in Parliament
shortly before it was dissolved in 1536, and was completed within a
decade by royal fiat. A new nobility of the middle class was built
as many of its houses were built out of the monasteries, and self-

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liturgy, its traditionalism, its sense of order, and on the other hand
the nonconformist sects, with their emphasis on individual liberty.
The story is long and intricate. Its details are largely irrelevant, but
its kernel is not. The religious development of the British peoples
cannot be separated from the political, or the exercise of British
power at any period from the moral and spiritual context of that
period.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the people of the Brit-
ish Isles went through religious experiences that left their mark on
the subsequent character of the nation. In the sixteen decades be-
tween the breach from Rome and the Toleration Act of 1689 reli-
gion was at the core of domestic politics, of Anglo-Scots and Anglo-
Irish relations, of foreign affairs, even to some extent of economic
growth. The questions raised about the doctrine and structure of the
church brought into dispute the basic nature of Christianity, and
were so fundamental that they could not be settled by reason, let
alone by force. They were implicit at the beginning of the period,
and they were the reason why it was important that Henry set the
church on a new path.

He had no such intention. His breach from Rome was a political
act to achieve a political end. He was determined to change the
headship of the Church, but equally determined to make no other
religious change if he could help it. He considered himself always
as Defender of the Faith, and by his own lights he was; Protestants
were as much heretics to him as to Clement. If one Englishman,
such as Sir Thomas More, insisted on papal headship of the Church,
he was executed for the political crime of treason; if another Eng-
lishman insisted that the seven sacraments were nonsense, he was
executed for the religious crime of heresy. Henry's logic was excel-
lent, if narrow. His church reflected his narrowness, for in doctrine
it was thoroughly Catholic, though no longer Roman.

Catholic doctrine rested on the belief that Christ founded a
church to continue His redemptive work through all time. His au-
thority was passed on to the apostles and from them to their succes-
sors, the bishops; from the bishops of each generation it passed out-
ward to the priests. This theory of apostolic succession meant that
the cleric was distinct from the layman by virtue of a God-given
power, and the distinction accounts for the enormous historical in-
fluence of any Catholic church. Its clergy monopolized the means of

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convinced. Soon it was playing its part in the great revolt of
Protestantism.

That revolt rapidly developed into an attack on the concept of an
authoritarian church. "The Christian who has true repentance/'
said Luther, "has already received pardon from God." In that sen-
tence he touched the essence of Protestantism. If an individual can
secure absolution through his own direct relationship with God,
what is the role of the priest? It is not to administer a sacrament in
the Catholic sense; priestly mediation is not required when God ab-
solves directly. The power inherent in the priesthood through apos-
tolic succession evaporated as the logic of Protestantism developed;
the sacraments changed from a priestly rite to an inner experience,
and the change revolutionized the older conception of the church.

The priest became the minister, or agent, and in practice he was
at least as much the agent of the congregation as of the Almighty
the teacher and counselor, with no more authority than his human
learning and wisdom might give him. The Protestant ministry
slowly abandoned its claim to determine doctrine. That right rested
in the last analysis with the individual Christian, who depended for
salvation on his own contact with deity. He might depute his right
to the community of the faithful by which he meant the group of
those who believed as he did but he never surrendered it. For the
final sanction of pope or metropolitan he substituted that of his own
conscience.

A tremendous centrifugal force was thus innate in Protestantism.
Since the days of Luther there has not been a Protestant church, but
more and more sects and divisions of sects. This disruptive process
has gone on despite appeals to the authority of the state, despite the
efforts of religious leaders and the rigid centralization of some
groups, such as the Presbyterians. It has gone on because the logic
of Protestantism approaches as its limit religious anarchy, where
there are as many churches as individuals.

The Catholic, in summary, emphasized the church. It was a hu-
man institution divinely ordained, and the power and authority de-
rived from its origin were vested in its priesthood; the priests were
instruments of salvation for the laity, whose duty was faith and
obedience. The Protestant emphasis was on the other extreme, the
individual, whose duty was to recognize and maintain his own rela-

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ments of royal control. He would not allow his subjects the danger-
ous freedom to argue points of religion, for that way Protestantism
lay.

"And what follows then?

Commotions, uproars, with a general taint

Of the whole state: as, of late days, our neighbours,

The upper Germany, can dearly witness,

Yet freshly pitied in our memories." 4

Henry's position was strong because he was strong. Logically,
however, it was weak in two fundamentals, and its weakness boded
trouble for his successors. The passage of the Six Articles estab-
lished that the source of doctrine was the king in parliament. This
legal phrase had meaning at the time, because Crown and Parlia-
ment were virtually a single, fused power. But what would happen
if one of the constituent elements went one way, one another? Au-
thority had passed from the priesthood to the laity, but where in the
laity did it reside in the body of the faithful, represented in Parlia-
ment, or in the layman who wore the crown?

The second weakness was in the king's control of ecclesiastical
administration. Church affairs had traditionally been the field of
papal and royal prerogative rather than of statute, and in it Henry
was now more absolute than in secular government; his absolutism,
political and temporal in origin, was exercised in the spiritual sphere.
This was Erastianism, state control of the Church, in its baldest
form. It would be accepted only as long as divinity hedged the king,
as long as the people accepted the principle of authority in religion
without inquiring into its genesis or logic. Once the government of
the Church began to gall a significant group of laymen, royal con-
trol through the bishops would come into question. That question
would lead, as surely as the doctrinal question, to the issue of where
ecclesiastical sovereignty resided. The authoritarianism of Henry's
church was not founded on the rock of theory. He had good reason
to extirpate his few Protestant subjects.

He did two things, however, that paved the way for the spread of
Protestantism. In the first place he had the Bible translated into
English and a copy put in every parish church, so that the laity
or rather the minority of laymen who were literate could explore
for themselves the written basis of the faith. In the second place he

* Shakespeare: Henry VIII, V, iii, 27-31.

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executed. His successor, the Duke of Northumberland, had as much
idealism as the worst ward politician, but both he and Somerset fa-
vored, for different reasons, the new religious doctrines. With that
favor and the guidance of Cranmer, the Church first moved toward
Protestantism.

Henry had seen to it that the services were not translated into
English. Laymen were unlikely to question the content of the liturgy
as long as it remained in a Latin that was both familiar and incom-
prehensible. The linguistic barrier between the priest and the con-
gregation, furthermore, was like the physical barrier of the rood
screen between them in church, the symbol of an inner distinction. 5
Two years after Henry's death the services were rendered into Eng-
lish. The work was directed by Cranmer and was in places his own;
it is still his greatest memorial. With the exception of the Bible,
nothing in English literature has exercised a deeper influence than
the Book of Common Prayer.

The book was more Protestant than Henry would have counte-
nanced, particularly in its handling of the sacrament of communion.
This sacrament was from the start the touchstone of Catholicism.
The whole theory of apostolic succession hinged on what hap-
pened at the moment when the bread and wine were consecrated.
Did they become in essence the flesh and blood of Christ, or did
they remain merely bread and wine? If the former, the change was
achieved by virtue of a power transmitted through the priesthood;
if the latter, there was no such power, and communion was no more
than a memorial service. On this crucial point the first edition of the
prayer book was ambiguous. But in the <4 black rubric" of the second
edition, of 1552, communion was explicitly pronounced to be a
memorial.

The doctrinal change reflected a rapid increase of Protestantism in
the government. This was due only in part to the development of
Cranmer's thought. Somerset was a liberal in religion, with an idea
scandalous and sinful to most of his age that diversity of belief
should be tolerated within the national church. Toleration could be
achieved only by a statement of doctrine, like that in the prayer
book of 1549, so ambiguous that the layman could interpret it to

5 One office of the Church rmnimized that distinction: the litany was recited
in the fields by priest and people together, in common supplication for the
crops, and the litany alone was translated before the old King died.

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tries, Italy, Spain, and the Spanish possessions in America. The son,
Philip II, had great resources at his command. The New World pro-
vided bullion, at first gold and then silver, to finance his empire;
the great money markets of the Low Countries provided the means
for converting bullion into power; Spain provided the finest armies
in Christendom. And the Church provided tie dynamic of crusade.

The papacy was setting its citadel in order and turning to the at-
tack. The Council of Trent was eliminating some of the worst
abuses on which the Protestant revolt had fed, and was reiterating
the dogma of the Church with uncompromising clarity. The Society
of Jesus, disciplined like the Spanish armies in which its founder
had been trained, was carrying that dogma into the strongholds of
Protestantism. But the counteroffensive was not only ideological
warfare; it was waged also with the military force of Spain. Span-
ish nationalism had been nurtured on the long struggle to oust the
Moors from the peninsula, and crusading zeal was in the marrow of
the Spanish bone. Now the nation was called again to its destiny of
defending the faith, and it responded with a will a will that to
the Spaniard was one with the will of God. The spearhead of the
Catholic Reformation was forged of Toledo steel.

The progress of that reformation "was inseparable from the Span-
ish bid for political hegemony. England was vitally concerned with
both. She could be returned to Rome only by being subordinated to
Madrid, as Mary's policy soon made clear. The Queen moved by
stages, each of which aroused greater opposition than the preced-
ing. Henrician Catholicism was restored by her first parliament, but
beyond that point Parliament would not go. Mary momentarily
abandoned the effort, in order to arrange her marriage with Philip.
In this she finally succeeded, after crushing a rebellion that had for
a time endangered her throne. Success blinded her to the fact that
she was squandering her popularity, and she next turned to com-
pleting the religious reaction. Parliamentary opposition was over-
borne, papal headship re-established (though only on the assurance
that the former monastic lands would not be touched), and the na-
tion formally absolved of the sin of schism. Mary was in sight of her
objectives.

But she had not yet secured them. The few English Protestants
were covert rebels, waiting to undo her work, and large numbers of
Catholics were anti-papal and anti-Spanish. Mary resolved to elimi-

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than her father how to win the affection of her subjects, and had
inherited his uncanny sense of public opinion. At home her leader-
ship was less aggressive than his because she did not have his
power; her position was increasingly circumscribed as the middle
class grew toward maturity. In Europe she faced a danger more se-
rious than anything in Henry's reign, and handled it with a cunning
and sagacious courage. For forty-five years she played an essentially
defensive game, in domestic policy guarding the church she had es-
tablished and the prerogative she had inherited; in foreign policy
guarding England against the menace of Spain and Rome. The
game was to her taste. She played it brilliantly, if by rules of her
own, and she had a great measure of success.

At Elizabeths accession the most immediate problem was the
church. In the preceding generation her people had been through
bewildering alterations, from Roman to Henrician Catholicism, then
to the Protestantism of Cranmer and Northumberland, then back to
Rome again. By 1558 each position had its embattled adherents; dis-
cord threatened to split the country and open it to foreign domina-
tion. The problem, as the Queen saw it, was less one of doctrine
than of politics to reach a quick and broad settlement, which
would isolate the die-hards of right and left by satisfying the great
bulk of the nation. If the result were puzzling to theologians, that
would be a small price to pay for the good of the realm. The good
was for Elizabeth much what it had been for Machiavelli, "that with
which the majority is content."

The Queen's settlement of the Church was thus a political act,
even more than Henry's had been, and the establishment still bears
her hallmark. The authoritarian element was preserved in theory by
emphasizing the priesthood and the bishops, in practice by exerting
the power of the Crown. Elizabeth did not call herself head of the
Church, but she allowed no one to question that she was. Her con-
trol was exercised in part through the hierarchy, in part through
prerogative courts outside the purview of the common law. Parlia-
ment might suggest, if it did so tactfully, but it might never com-
mand. Its function -was to legalize the basic structure and doctrine
of the Church as formulated by the government, and then to refrain
from interference in matters ecclesiastical. *T see many over-bold
with God Almighty," she told Parliament, ^making too many subtle
scannings of His blessed will, as lawyers do with human testaments.

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Lutheran. If it had remained so, Elizabeth's difficulties would have
been less than they were. Whatever the Lutheran's intransigence
on matters of faith, he was slow to question the Erastian principle
when it provided a congenial form of worship. But English Prot-
estantism had been transformed during Mary's reign. Some of its
adherents had been martyred; otters, less courageous or more nim-
ble, had escaped to the Continent, and many of them had gone
not to the Germany of Luther but to the Geneva of John Calvin.
When they were allowed to return after Elizabeth's accession, they
brought home with them the germs of the Puritan movement.

Few words in English history are harder to define than the word
"Puritan," unless possibly the word 'liberal" today. The dictionary
is little help; a Puritan is more than one who wishes to purify the
church, just as a Protestant is more than one who protests against
abuses. In the one case, as in the other, accurate definition is less
important than the connotation that the name has acquired from the
men who bore it. In this sense a Puritan might be a squire or a pau-
per, a member of the Church of England or an Anabaptist; but
whatever his class or sect he was strongly tinged with Calvinism.

His faith rested on the hard rock of predestination the belief
that God had chosen some for salvation, some for hell, and that no
man's conduct in this life could alter his foreordained fate. The Puri-
tan bent his will, nevertheless, to achieving a rigid standard of con-
duct, the righteousness fitting for one elected by God to the com-
pany of the saints. His motive was not to win election, which was
impossible, and not primarily to convince his neighbors of his elec-
tion, but at bottom to convince himself. This motive, more psycho-
logical than logical, was the dynamic of Puritanism.

The Puritan's attitude toward the state was an outgrowth of his
attitude toward heaven. He had no respect for temporal authority as
such. No government might command his obedience for long un-
less he was convinced that it was a government of the elect. His con-
viction was a fragile thing; in practice it might be shattered as ef-
fectively by an attack on his economic as on his religious interests.
Because no government can endure without trespassing on some in-
terests, the Puritan was from the beginning a potential revolu-
tionary.

His attitude toward the church was even more uncompromising.

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were unhealthy for such thoughts, and they were uttered only by
extremists. But moderate men listened with an increasing interest
that boded trouble once Elizabeth was gone.

She herself evaded serious trouble. She did so partly because of
her skill and popularity, partly because the opposition still lacked a
coherent program, and above all because the country could not af-
ford religious dissension. England was engaged in a struggle for na-
tional existence, and one of the cardinal aspects of existence was the
national church. When survival is at stake, reform is likely to go by
the board. So the Elizabethan Puritans found. They had to bide
their time, and meanwhile to fight for Queen and Church.

VI The Elizabethan Defensive

THE GREAT struggle against the Catholic Reformation was to
a large degree inherent in Elizabeth's accession. She was bound to
renew the breach with Rome, if not because of her birth, then be-
cause of the lesson of Mary's reign. Once the breach was reaffirmed
and the Spanish tie finally renounced, only one factor could save
England from a desperate war against the Pope and Philip. That
factor was France. If the Valois monarchy continued as a prime ob-
stacle to Spanish ambition, England might not be deeply involved.
But France at this juncture was paralyzed by thirty years of civil
wars, during which her power in Europe sank to the negligible.
England was thus forced, for the first time in the century, into a key
position. She was the leading anti-Roman state, and she was an ob-
vious target for Spanish hostility. Sooner or later she would have to
fight for her life.

Elizabeth greatly preferred later to sooner. Although she had her
share of the family courage, it was of the sort that accepts dangers,
and juggles them until they wear away. She hated nothing more
than irrevocable decisions, and her skill in postponing them brought
gray hairs to her councilors. But in some cases it also brought great
gains to her people, and in none more patently than in her dealings
with Spain. For thirty years two-thirds of her reign she avoided
an open breach. While France was apparently falling apart, the
cause of Protestantism going into eclipse, and Philip's power spread-
ing across the world from the Netherlands to the Pacific and the In-
dian Ocean, England remained nominally at peace. When the Span-

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deliverance. A few months later Mary Stuart's husband, who had re-
cently become King of France, died without issue. Mary soon tired
of being a dowager queen in Paris, and returned to try to be a real
one in Edinburgh. Her chance at best was slim. She was as much a
Catholic as her mother and almost as French, and the Scots were ill-
disposed toward another female ruler; the Crown had little prestige
or force, at a time when rebellion had become a habit. Mary de-
stroyed what little chance she had. She remarried to carry on the
line, and soon bore a son- James, the future king of Scotland and
England. But she had chosen to marry a fool; she became involved
in his murder and then eloped with his murderer. Such conduct was
political lunacy. However much it has appealed to subsequent ro-
manticists, it outraged the moral sense of the Scots, Catholic and
Calvinist alike. Rebellion germinated almost spontaneously. Mary
abdicated in favor of her son and escaped to England, where her
fellow queen promptly imprisoned her.

Elizabeth was acting not generously, but sensibly. Mary, from the
day she crossed the border to the day of her death, was the most
dangerous person in the kingdom. She had lost Scotland, it is true,
but she was not dangerous as Queen of Scots. In Protestant eyes she
was heiress presumptive to the English throne, because Elizabeth
was the last Tudor, and unmarried. In Catholic eyes Mary was the
rightful queen of England, because Elizabeth was illegitimate and
therefore a usurper. Extremists among the recusants turned to Mary
as their hope, and so did Elizabeth's foreign enemies. France had
shot her bolt and was crippled with civil wars, but Philip was ob-
serving with interest. Mary without her French backing could be
invaluable to Mother Church and to Spain. If the disaffected recu-
sants were stiffened with a Spanish army, and Elizabeth conven-
iently assassinated, Queen Mary II might again return England to
the fold, this time as a complete Spanish satellite. Philip's design ma-
tured over the years, and it insured that Mary remained in confine-
ment; Elizabeth dared not allow her at large. One plot after an-
other was made to release her, but they all miscarried.

Philip might have been more effective if he had not been dis-
tracted elsewhere. He was involved in the Mediterranean and in the
French civil wars. In 1566 his subjects in the Low Countries, his
richest dominion, rose against him. The struggle dragged on for
years; he eventually succeeded in winning back the southern Neth-

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carry cargoes rather than guns, were larger, less maneuverable, and
weaker in fire-power than the English ships; the latter were designed
for the choppy seas and changeable winds off the British Isles, and
they carried tiers of guns on the lower decks. The Spaniards were
not only at a tactical disadvantage; they had also been lulled into a
false security. American waters had long been their preserve, pri-
marily because no enemy had been strong enough and near enough
to attack, and the appearance of the English was a rude shock. In
America itself no effective defense was possible. The Spanish gov-
ernment could not protect every valuable cargo or garrison every
tempting coastal town without squandering its last resources. Either
the raids would continue indefinitely, or the raiders would be
stopped at their base. The best defense of the American empire was
to invade England.

By the 1580*8 more pressing developments led Philip to decide on
invasion. In 1584 the Dutch leader, William the Silent, was assassi-
nated, and the rebellion threatened to fall apart without his guiding
hand; Elizabeth was at last forced to active intervention. At the
same time she took a step that was even more open defiance of
Spain. As tension grew, the danger from Mary Stuart and the Eng-
lish recusants increased. In 1586 the Queen of Scots embarked on
her last plot, which was conducted as usual under the surveillance
almost the auspices of the English government. It was exposed,
and Mary was tried and convicted. By now, even Elizabeth's scru-
ples had worn thin; she signed the death warrant, and in February
1587 Mary was beheaded.

Her execution was tantamount to a declaration of war on Spain,
and was so accepted; Philip determined to attack. The problem be-
fore "Him was that which has subsequently confronted every master
of western Europe from Louis XIV through Hitler: he had an over-
whelmingly superior land force, but how was he to get it across the
narrow waters of the Channel? The Spanish answer was simple
to assemble in Spain the largest fleet that the world had yet seen,
and with this armada to sweep the Channel as far as the Low Coun-
tries; then to ferry the Duke of Parma's veterans from the Nether-
lands to England. Elizabeth's army was a rabble of civilians, Parma's
the finest in Europe. Once the Spaniards landed, the issue would be
settled.

The few Englishmen who understood the situation sensed that

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turned to the weakest outwork of England's defenses, the point at
which the French later struck repeatedly. This was Ireland. Philip's
attempt failed to achieve his ends, but it further embittered Anglo-
Irish relation's.

Ireland was for Elizabeth much what the disaffected Netherlands
were for Philip, a drain on governmental resources and an oppor-
tunity for foreign intervention. The native Irish outside the Pale had
been restive ever since Mary's day, when the English had begun
planting settlers on land confiscated from rebellious chieftains; dur-
ing Elizabeth's reign the Anglo-Irish of the Pale grew resentful of
the taxation imposed by her governors. These grievances were sub-
ordinate, however, to religious friction: the attempt to impose on
the Irish an English church, and even a liturgy in English, created
an explosive situation within and without the Pale. As Scottish na-
tionalism was becoming tied to a new faith, Irish was becoming tied
to an old, and the effect on the two countries was opposite. Calvin-
ism was pulling Scotland away from France and toward England;
Roman Catholicism was pulling Ireland away from England and to-
ward whatever Continental enemy the English might have.

For the moment that enemy was Spain, and the agents of the Pope
and Philip were quick to seize the opportunity. Within three years
of Elizabeth's accession, papal emissaries had begun their work in
Ireland. A series of rebellions reached its climax in the rising of
1598, a nearer approach to a national movement than anything with
which the English had had to contend. As in almost all Irish bids
for freedom, the timing was bad: the rebels* momentum spent itself
before a Spanish army came to the rescue, and the English disposed
of the two threats separately. Although Elizabeth's resources were
strained to the breaking point, peace was virtually restored by the
time of her death.

Like so many other aspects of the Queen's great defensive, the
struggle in Ireland brought troubles to come. It taught different les-
sons on the two sides of St. George's Channel. The Irish began to
learn that their only hope of shaking off the foreign yoke was to re-
bel when England was involved in a crisis of her own; the English
began to learn the Irish aptitude for what they considered treach-
ery in a dark hour, and they retaliated ruthlessly. The aftermath was
bitterness on both sides. The suppression of the rising also left a
momentous question to Elizabeth's successor. Now that Ireland was

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solidarity of wartime England began to be marred by the bicker-
ings of peace, but serious trouble did not develop as long as Eliza-
beth lived.

The Queen was loved by her people, probably more than any
other sovereign in their history. They loved her partly for herself
(most of them never saw the mean side of her) and partly as the
embodiment of England. Also they feared her. She was Tudor to
her marrow, and age impaired the Tudor temper but not the Tudor
will. She retained to her dying day the gift of using love and fear
for the defense of her own prerogative, and so for the defense of
the status quo. Why, after all, should the Puritan vent his griev-
ances when he could get a glow of loyalty from postponing what he
was afraid to do? He had all the more reason to wait until the awe-
some old woman was dead, because he expected that then his chance
would come.

It would come, he thought, in the person of a Calvinist king. Eliz-
abeth had juggled for years with the issue of the succession, flirting
with one suitor after another while Parliament begged her to settle
the question to marry someone, almost anyone, in order to carry
oh the dynasty. Whether she ever intended to is still her secret; only
the outcome is apparent. In the early decades of the reign she used
flirtation as a diplomatic weapon; it served her as a smoke screen to
keep the courts of Europe guessing what her course would be. By
the later 1570's the marital problem became separated from the dy-
nastic because the Queen was beyond the age of child-bearing. But
she still encouraged suitors and refused to discuss her successor.

Well she might refuse; the dilemma seemed too hopeless to dis-
cuss. The heir by statute was the descendant of Henry VTII's
younger sister, Mary, but this line had sunk into political insignifi-
cance. The heir by heredity was the Queen of Scots, who could gain
the throne only through civil war and Spanish invasion. This Gor-
dian knot was cut by the axe that beheaded Mary Stuart. Thereafter
there was an heir, her son, whose claim rested both on heredity and
on common sense. James was a foreigner like his mother, but he
was neither a Roman Catholic nor a puppet of Catholic powers.
The shadow of the Kirk had been over him since birth. The English
Puritans therefore assumed that he was a good Calvinist, and they
awaited his accession as the dawn of a new' era. Until the dawn
came, they were willing to delay their awkward questions.

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open Atlantic, through which they ran around Africa to the Orient
and westward to the New World. Their European terminus was no
longer Italy, but the Iberian peninsula. Both Spain and Portugal,
however, were poor countries without the financial resources to ex-
ploit their opportunities, the domestic market to absorb their im-
ports, or the domestic manufactures to satisfy colonial demands
and to trade for the riches of the East. By the late sixteenth century
their capital and exports came in large part from the Low Countries
and the Germanies; consequently their imports from overseas, in
commensurate part, passed through the great entrep&ts of the pen-
insula back to northern Europe. Because transport was infinitely
cheaper by water than by land, one of the busiest trade routes in
the world was that which ran through the Bay of Biscay, the Chan-
nel, and the North Sea.

This shift in trade revolutionized England's economic position.
Tudor capitalists found new horizons opening before them; manu-
factures were in increasing demand, traders and investors had op-
portunities thrown in their path at every turn. The English busi-
ness world was being pulled into closer contact with its counterpart
across the Channel, and was putting out tentative feelers into the
darkness beyond Europe. English society, which might have become
spiritually isolated and ingrowing after the break with Rome, was
beginning to have cosmopolitanism forced upon it through trade.

The new geography of commerce made possible the emergence
of England as a major power. The sea dogs had demonstrated that
Spain was vulnerable in the New World, and the temporary merger
of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in 1580 opened still greater
vistas of freebooting. But it was in Europe that the weight of Eng-
land, as a state, was being felt most markedly. The defeat of the
Armada suggested that where Spain had failed no other naval power
might hope to succeed that England could, if she exerted herself,
clamp a tourniquet on the artery of trade that ran through the nar-
row seas. Any state that artery fed had to reckon with her.

The English alone were focusing all their energies on a single
form of power, their ships. They had no real standing army de-
spite a so-called system for raising one because they had been un-
willing to bear the burden of what they had hoped was unnecessary.
The Armada put their hope to the crucial test and fulfilled it. They

Chapter Two

THE PASSING OF TUDOR ENGLAND
1603-1660

I The Advent of the Stuarts

T1T7HEN Queen Elizabeth lay dying, in March of 1603, Tudor
V V statecraft was dying with her. Its ghost lingered for another
generation, but its life was disappearing with the conditions that
had brought it into existence. The Crown and the middle class had
once been in tacit alliance against the relics of the aristocracy and
the vested power of the Church. Now the alliance had been dis-
solved by success. The nobles had been shorn of authority and the
Church reduced to a department of the state; the political ambition
of the middle class was increasing with its wealth and experience.
The Tudors, for all their acumen, had made the job of kingship pro-
gressively more difficult. They had forced the people who mattered
those of substance into the work of local and national govern-
ment, generation after generation, and had thereby bred into them
a sense of their own importance.

The mirror of change was the House of Commons. Its members
were no longer the same breed who had listened in awe to Cardinal
Wolsey; their temper was now too tough to bend even before Eliza-
beth. She had kept government going by a judicious blend of femi-
nine and royal prerogative, of cajolery and concession, and she had
been supported by the prestige of victory and of her own longevity.
Hers had been a personal and intuitive technique, not a theory of
sovereignty, and it was inimitable. Whoever followed her would in-
herit her problems, grown worse with her passing, and could not in-
herit her solutions.

If changing conditions made the task of any successor difficult,

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wall of prescriptive authority was almost impregnable, and few
Englishmen werfe ready to assail it in earnest. As long as authority
was not used to narrow the doctrine of the broad Elizabethan set-
tlement, the Puritan's resentment of the bishops drew only sporadic
support from the bulk of the squires and burgesses.

But other sources of resentment were appearing, with which the
Puritans as such had no concern. As James's reign progressed, his
policy engendered discontent on financial, legal, economic, and po-
litical grounds as well as on religious. These disparate grievances
had a single focus in the House of Commons, where they were
slowly fused into one. Grievance, unredressed, generated a demand
for power by the Lower House, and raised the ultimate problem of
where sovereignty resided. This problem, like all constitutional ul-
timates, transcended settlement by constitutional means. The only
possible arbiter was force.

At the beginning of the reign such a development was as far from
the King's thoughts as from his subjects*. James merely intended to
rationalize certain aspects of the Tudor regime. Public finance was
a jumble; the legal system required overhauling; the nation needed
a wise directing hand for its economy and a logical framework for its
foreign policy. These were the types of reform that the King had in
mind. Much can be said for each of them, and in some he was wiser
than his opponents. What vitiated his plans was not their aim but
their premise, that his wisdom exceeded that of all others. The prem-
ise made discussion difficult and compromise almost impossible, and
tied the prestige of monarchy to the outcome of the monarch's
experiments.

James's handling of the financial crisis is a case in point. The prob-
lem of revenue was fundamental to the Stuarts because the tradi-
tional methods of financing the state were becoming progressively
less adequate. The needs of an increasingly complex society had to
be met by increasing the activities, and therefore the cost, of gov-
ernment; and the buying power of money was declining as more
and more bullion came into circulation. The ordinary revenues of
the Crown, derived from royal lands, feudal dues, court fines, etc.,
were relatively fixed and inelastic. The extraordinary revenues
the taxes granted by Parliament were lump sums set by tradition
and virtually unrelated to the nation's taxable wealth; the number
of taxes granted could be increased, but not the yield from any one.

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it? In practice, it had resided wherever there had been the power to
declare and enforce it in the medieval Crown or baronage, in the
Lancastrian Parliaments as tools of a new aristocracy, in the Tudor
synthesis of the Crown in Parliament. Now that this synthesis was
Disappearing, and King and commons were drifting apart, what in-
stitution had a better claim than the Crown to interpret law?

Parliament by itself had no claim; it possessed authority only in
conjunction with the sovereign. The prerogative courts, which had
been growing in number and prestige during the Tudor period,
could not by their nature be a brake on the prerogative. The only
remaining possibility, and a faint one, was the courts of common
law. Their judges were conservatives, dyed in the wool of precedent,
and they were royal servants who held office at the king's will; con-
sequently they were weak strings with which to bind royal preten-
sions. The wonder is not that they failed to do so, but that one of
them was bold enough to make the attempt.

la Sir Edward Coke, chief justice successively of Common Pleas
and King's Bench, James met his match in self-assurance. Coke re-
fused to be influenced or intimidated. In the face of divine right he
advanced the claim that law is supreme, above king or parliament
or judge. His claim had more sweeping implications than he or his
contemporaries could realize. Its logical conclusion was that fun-
damental law is superior to both prerogative and statute, and that
the judges as interpreters of law take precedence over the executive
and legislature. A development of this idea became possible two
centuries later in the United States, with its written constitution, but
such a concept of the judiciary remained permanently alien to the
British tradition.

Neither Coke nor James was interested in the implications of the
argument. What mattered to them was that the majesty of law had
been asserted in the teeth of Stuart majesty. The assertion, how-
ever much it impressed that legalistic age, was impracticable while
the substance of power remained with the King. James triumphed,
as he was bound to do in such an unequal struggle; Coke was dis-
missed, and for the next two decades the courts offered little hin-
drance to the prerogative. But the triumph was dearly bought. A
generation of Englishmen lost the chance for legal redress of their
grievances, which grew until they became explosive.

The triumph also failed to solve the financial problem. All the

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largely Celtic in blood and speech, devoutly Roman Catholic, and
embittered by British conquest and exploitation. Ulster was ruled
by English-speaking Scots, Presbyterians in religion, who looked to
Britain for the support on which their position depended. These
two Irelands, existing side by side and hating each other, grew from
the dragon's teeth that the Jacobeans sowed.

The emigration to North America, like that to Ireland, was closely
connected with hard times at home. The Pilgrims had been tough-
ened against the rigors of the New World, as William Bradford tes-
tified, by the rigors of life in England; "it was the Lord which . . .
had beforehand prepared them, many having long borne the yoke,
yea, from their youth/* Others, less conscious that they were upheld
by the Almighty, were driven to the adventure by sheer desperation.
"God send me to go," wrote one who was leaving for Virginia. "If
His will be, I shall die, for I had rather die with credit than live
with shame.** x In such a mood the settlers fought the Indians and
nature. Many died, but the settlements lived.

The dangers 'were not only from Indians and nature. The Span-
iards were already in Florida, the French on the St. Lawrence; soon
the Dutch occupied the Hudson valley and, with the Swedes, estab-
lished themselves on the Delaware. As these and the British hold-
ings expanded toward each other, friction was bound to develop in
America and between the home governments. Britain could never
consolidate her position on the Atlantic coast until the Dutch had
been ousted from the Delaware and the Hudson, or secure the
northern flank of New England without a struggle against the
French. Political and commercial rivalries in Europe, conversely,
were sure to kindle sooner or later the fires of colonial war. A strug-
gle for empire was implicit in the building of the first houses at
Plymouth and Jamestown.

During the first half of the century Britain was unready for such
a struggle. She was torn by domestic quarrels and little interested in
empire, and the Stuart navy was pitiably weak; her rivals in Amer-
ica might well have been able to wrest her colonies from her. In-
stead France and Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden turned their
attention to central Europe. While they were fighting the Thirty
Years* War, British settlements grew and prospered along the Chesa-

1 From a private letter of 1620, Gloucester (England) Public Library MS.
16,531, foL 64.

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later, an Austro-Spanish attempt to dominate the Germanies, and
the Hapsburgs would need what allies they could get. Spanish
friendship was valuable to Britain as a counterweight to France in
the west. On this logical basis negotiations were opened with
Madrid.

Logic ignored two factors: English nationalism and Spanish acu-
men. The long crusade against Philip II had bred in the English
people a hatred of Spain and of the Pope. Now the King was pro-
posing to ally his dynasty with both to insure a succession of Ro-
man Catholic, pro-Spanish sovereigns, under whom the Jesuits
might work to subvert the Church, England become a Hapsburg
pawn, and the wealth of Spanish America be closed forever to Eng-
lish adventurers. The arguments that had roused the Elizabethans
against Philip now roused the Jacobeans against their own king.

The Spanish government was well informed. It knew that James
could not offer a real alliance, and that Prince Charles by himself
was worth little; it consequently had no intention of accepting the
proposal. But the continuance of negotiations averted war and em-
broiled James with Parliament; negotiations therefore continued. At
last the would-be bridegroom took a hand: Charles went courting
to Madrid, where he and his companions found a cold welcome, and
whence he soon returned a bachelor. London greeted him with the
one and only ovation of his life. The Spanish match had failed, and
the cheers of the crowd marked the end of James's scheme and vir-
tually of his reign. He lingered on until 1625, discouraged and sick,
but the government passed to younger hands.

For more than twenty years James unconsciously sowed tie
wind. The problems he met at his accession were serious; those he
passed on to his son would have baffled the wisdom of Solomon.
The change was the measure of the reign, but the King was only in
part responsible. He was faced by pressures before which even Eliz-
abeth had had to give ground; his choice, at bottom, was between
submitting voluntarily to a further diminution of the prerogative or
clinging to it and precipitating conflict. For him this was no choice.
God had made him a king, in an age when kings were in the ascend-
ant, and duty impelled him to uphold the rights of his calling.

James was miscast as royalty. As a don of an Oxford or Cambridge
college he might have busied himself in writing tomes on statecraft,
wrangling with a few colleagues, and lecturing students who dared

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then and only then did he plan to co-operate against the Spaniards.
Charles could not befriend Catholics at home and at the same time
abandon the Protestants of France, who for half a century had
looked to England for support; he expected Richelieu to attack
the Palatinate forthwith and leave the Huguenots alone. Friction
mounted rapidly, and soon Charles and Buckingham drifted into the
incredible folly of a war with France. The Hapsburgs and the Bour-
bons were inveterate enemies, yet Britain was fighting them both at
once. This was the nadir of statesmanship.

Buckingham, who had blundered egregiously in the Spanish war,
hoped to regain his popularity. He decided to open the new war by
an expedition to aid the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle. No
money, it was patent, would be forthcoming from Parliament; the
Duke had too many failures to his credit. Raising the money
strained the King's resources to the breaking point. Charles had al-
ready experimented with a free gift, and had found that his sub-
jects were stingy givers. He now tried what was called a forced
loan, and was almost universally defied. A few prominent defaulters
were arbitrarily imprisoned, to encourage the others, but the King
gained far more hostility than cash.

The failure of the loan led to difficulty in collecting the troops.
The government, unable to pay for their keep, was forced to billet
them in private homes on their way to the port of embarkation. The
Tommy Atkins of the period was far from an ideal guest. He had
been forced into service by the press gang, which usually took from
any community the men whom the magistrates wished to be rid of.
He was likely to be a criminal and almost sure to be rowdy; "he will
be his own carver of whatsoever he likes best and can lay his hands
on, to the great damage and impoverishing of the country." 2 The
householders subjected to this damage were for the most part men of
substance, and billeting soon became an acute grievance.

By the time Buckingham sailed for La Rochelle, England was
seething with anger. The one thing needed to turn anger to fury
was a military disaster, and this he supplied. His generalship was
on a par with his statecraft; after three months he was chased home
with less than half of his soldiers. The army was now a wreck, the
government bankrupt, but Charles was still in honor bound to aid

2 Quoted in my Gloucestershire: a Study in Local Government, 1590-1640
(New Haven, 1940), p. 99.

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"the young courtier of the king's" whom the ballad-maker had sat-
irized. 8 The men who buried the Duke were even then on the road to
civil war, and he had done his share to set them on it. Fourteen
years later the drums of the trained bands were beating again in
London, but not for joy.

The murder made the struggle between Charles and Parliament
all the more patent. As long as Buckingham had lived, it had been
possible to pretend that he was misleading crown and people. Once
he was dead, responsibility devolved inescapably upon the King,
and the throne itself became the focus of the nation's resentment.
Charles was alone in the center of the stage.

By contrast with his father, .Charles looked like a king. He was
not tall, but he had the bearing of a patrician; his dignity became al-
most heroic as the world darkened around him. He was isolated
from the run of men by the awful concept of the kingly office that
he had inherited from his father, and his natural shyness gave his
manner toward strangers or opponents the frosty aloofness of an
iceberg. The Puritans were incomprehensible to him. He was de-
vout, but he had none of James's Calvinism; the church that he
loved was the ritualistic, sacramental church that the Puritans de-
tested. To that church, to his family, and to his idea of kingship he
was deeply loyal. Out of his loyalties grew the later, legendary pic-
ture of Charles the Martyr.

But he had another side. He could be vindictive to his enemies
and an ingrate to his ablest servants; above all his pledged word was
unreliable. Bad faith might have been useful if a Machiavellian
mind had guided it, but Charles's intelligence was meager. His
judgment of people was no better than his father's as witness
Buckingham and his judgment of policy was far worse. At bottom
he was an obstinate little man, wandering in dignified bewilder-
ment through an earthquake.

By the time of Buckingham's death the first tremors of the earth-
quake were perceptible. King and commons were fighting each
other rather than the foreigner. Parliament controlled the where-
withal for policy because it alone could provide the necessary cash;
the King alone controlled the making of policy, and he would not
surrender his prerogative. This constitutional deadlock had pro-

s See Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Everyman ed., 2 vols.,
London and New York, 1906), II, 128-30.

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Star of Empire

IV The King Alone

DURING the years of personal government British foreign policy
was in abeyance. Money was lacking, and the energies of the King's
councillors were taxed to the uttermost to keep the wheels of do-
mestic administration turning. While the grim drama of the Thirty
Years' War unfolded, England and Scotland looked on; their influ-
ence in Europe was negligible, and their military force was a laugh-
ingstock. But the great powers fighting each other for dominance
in the Germanies turned their backs on the British Isles. The Eng-
lish and Scots were left free, unlike their German contemporaries or
the French or Dutch before them, to settle their own problems in
their own way. The Jacobeans had used that freedom for the luxury
of debate; their sons used it for revolution.

The European situation was more than a setting for the troubles
to come. It was a factor in the collapse of personal rule because it
had a subtle but pervasive effect on the King's administrative ma-
chinery. By dissolving Parliament Charles had dispersed his quar-
rel with his subjects into every county, borough, and parish; there,
and not in London courts and councils, his experiment had its final
test. The working of prerogative depended upon a host of local offi-
cials throughout the kingdom, and could be only as effective as they
were. In a period of national security their effectiveness declined.

Local magistrates had long tended to resist the demands of the
central government. The Tudors, in the process of uprooting the
feudal magnates, had deputed more and more authority to middle-
class officials, and by the seventeenth century these new recipients
of power had become a vested interest, almost as tenacious of their
right to govern and as restive under control from London as the bar-
ons before them. For a time their restiveness had been curbed by
the Spanish crisis, during which the exactions of government had
had the grudging consent of the governed. Once the crisis passed,
the administrative machinery grew less workable as its human cogs
became absorbed in their own affairs and impatient of interference
from London. The process culminated in Charles's personal rule,
which failed in great part because it ran counter to vested local
interests.

The Xing, in summary, ruled through a governing class to which
his predecessors had taught a sense of its own importance. It would

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After a few unsuccessful experiments the lawyers hit upon a re-
ally promising plan. Elizabeth had occasionally asked the seaports
to contribute to the navy, on the ground that their commerce was
protected by the royal ships; however questionable the logic, the
money had been paid. In 1634 Charles made a similar request, and
the response of the ports was so gratifying that within two years the
levy -was extended to all England. But opposition spread with the
tax. If ship money became established, it meant the permanent sub-
stitution of royal for parliamentary government. The taxpayer's
only question was how to avoid paying.

The obvious recourse was to the law, and this way was taken by
John Hampden. His famous case came to trial in 1637, the last mo-
ment when the courts might have resolved the impending conflict.
But the spirit of Coke had been dead for a generation, and the
Crown's argument was cogent. Elizabethan precedents showed that
ship money was legal in a moment of emergency, and the King had
decided that this was such a moment. The right to decide, not the
correctness of the decision, was the issue before the court; a ver-
dict against the Crown would have denied to it an essential attribute
of sovereignty, the power to provide for national defense. The
judges found for the King. However sound their lav/, they brought
revolution closer. Like the Dred Scott decision, more than two
centuries later, the verdict precluded legal redress for a grievance
that was bringing men's tempers to the boil. Once the way of the
law is closed, only the way of force remains.

By the time the judges upheld the King's experiment it was al-
ready beginning to collapse. Assessors of ship money were refusing
to assess, collectors to collect; if a sheriff impounded cattle in de-
fault of a man's tax, the beasts were released in the night, or no one
came forward to buy them. The King had transgressed the limits of
consent, and the results were obvious at Whitehall: as the stream of
receipts shrank to a trickle, the whole system of prerogative began
to totter. But it did not fall of its own weight, like the Bourbon re-
gime in 1789. It was destroyed by a blow from outside, which it had
not the strength to resist.

The blow had been preparing for years. It was the outcome of
the religious factor that had helped to launch Charles upon his ex-
periment. He had advanced Laud to the see of Canterbury in 1633,
and for the next seven years the Archbishop's concept of the Church

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established church; nonattendance was both illegal and, to the ma-
jority of a devout generation, unthinkable. The clergy also had to
acquiesce or stand alone against the power of Church and state.
Laud made diocesan visitations to ferret out any who dared deviate
from his requirements; the government used the prerogative courts
to enforce uniformity, until men forgot the routine and valuable
functions of those courts and regarded them only as engines of tyr-
anny. The Church was gradually made to conform to the pattern set
by the privy council. "In all state alterations, be they never so bad,"
as Thomas Fuller put it, "the pulpit will be of the same wood as
tie council board." 4

The anger of the country simmered under the surface. Criticism
was not aimed in general at the parish clergy, who had to obey or
lose their pulpits, or primarily at the Crown, which to most men
was remote and somewhat unreal; it was aimed at the bishops, the
heirs of the apostles and the henchmen of prerogative. Hatred of
them spread from the Puritans to many moderates, who came to
agree with the extremists in desiring not only the removal of the
Laudian prelates but the abolition of the whole episcopacy. In try-
ing to pull out the tares of Puritanism Charles and Laud had dis-
seminated them.

Still nothing happened. Discontent that would have roused rebel-
lion a century before was now endured; generations of domestic
peace had made obedience an English habit. In the seventy years
since the last armed rising the Crown had become synonymous in
men's minds with the principle of social order, and the church had
taken root in their hearts as the way of salvation. They were ap-
palled to watch the King twist the law and his bishops twist the
ritual, but their grievances were still local and disconnected. Only
Parliament could link them. Until the Houses met again the Eng-
lish might refuse to pay the King's taxes, but they would keep his
peace.

Not so the Scots. They were a tumultuous people, as James had
known to his cost, and little divinity hedged their sovereign. They
had dethroned Mary and had given James no peace until he ex-
changed Holyrood for Hampton Court; Charles, the stranger, they
tolerated only because he had left them largely alone. The monar-

* Quoted by G. P. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1898), p. 62.

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for fear that success would rouse against them the old hostility of
the English. But the King's position could not be maintained by the
forbearance of rebels. With the energy of the doomed he strug-
gled to find military force.

In the emergency he called upon his ablest servant. Thomas Went-
worth, now created Earl of Strafford, had been a champion of par-
liamentary liberties in the early years of the reign. But he had also
defended the prerogative, particularly against the Puritans; his ex-
perience of the House of Commons had convinced him that law
and order could never be fashioned by that debating society, and
he had turned to the Crown sacrificing his regard for liberty, like
the fascist of a later day, to his craving for strong government. In
1632 Charles had sent him to govern Ireland, into which his policy
of "thorough** had brought a semblance of order. When he re-
turned in 1639, his ruthlessness had been sharpened by cutting
through the tangles of Irish politics. "Black Tom Tyrant'* was as
competent as he was arrogant, and his arrival meant title end of half
measures. If anyone could give new life to a dying prerogative, he
was the man.

No one could. The Scottish crisis had gone too far to be settled by
the means at hand, and the loyalty of the English who alone could
provide new means had been drowned in their grievances. Straf-
ford saw the first half of this dilemma but not the second; the Irish
had accustomed him to a legislature that could be bullied into vot-
ing supplies. He advised the summoning of Parliament, and the des-
perate King agreed; the houses met in April 1640. It was appar-
ent at once that the Earl had miscalculated. The commons refused
supplies until they had considered England's ills, and they insisted
on immediate peace with the Scots. Neither Charles nor Stratford
was ready to surrender on such terms. After twenty-four days the
Short Parliament was dissolved.

For the next months Black Tom held the center of the stage. He
was making his last bid to save the monarchy, and all his enormous
vigor and resource were thrown into the effort. He hoped to wring
money from Irish and English taxpayers, and to bring over an Irish
army as his answer to rebellion. But Ireland was drifting toward
chaos now that his strong hand was removed, and neither taxes nor
troops were forthcoming. As for England, the will and energy of a
demon could not have extracted ship money in the summer of 1640.

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But the King had meanwhile unbalanced it, and their methods were
more drastic. They were less interested in asserting rights than in
manipulating power. The Scottish army, the London mob, the con-
trol of the purse, were means to the great end of insuring that the
King should never again govern on his own.

Charles had been forced onto the defensive, but he was far from
surrender. The supine fatalism of a Louis XVI or a Nicholas II was
not in him; he was a fighter in a way of his own, and the fact that
his way antagonized even his supporters reflects on his intelligence
rather than his spirit. At times he tried the bold attack, usually
when patience would have been wiser, and more often he used de-
vious intrigue. As the leaders of the commons progressed from dis-
trust to a conviction of his bad faith, their own actions became more
high-handed and less legal. So the last hope of peace faded. When
neither side believed in the other's respect for law, the constitutional
struggle could no longer be waged by constitutional means.

The session opened with an attack on the two great agents of the
Crown. Laud was impeached for high treason and committed to the
Tower, where he remained until his execution in 1645. The cause
for which he stood was lost before he entered prison; he had at-
tempted to play the part of an ecclesiastical Procrustes, and his fate
was not unlike that forthright reformer's. His ideas, however, sur-
vived as one element in the Church. He would have forced the es-
tablishment into a narrow Catholic frame; his enemies would have
forced it into the equally narrow frame of their Calvinism. If, in the
long run, either side had had its way, Anglicanism would have lost
its essential character. Instead it retained the dualism of its Eliza-
bethan origin, and in the periodic conflict of its elements, Catholic
and Protestant, it continued to renew its vitality. This conflict was
Laud's unintended but enduring legacy.

Legacies were no concern of the hurried and fearful men in the
House of Commons. At the same time that they were ridding them-
selves of the Archbishop they were faced with an even more pressing
danger. They could not breathe freely as long as Strafford lived, be-
cause he was the Kin^s military adviser and his brain; as the Earl
of Essex put it, "stone dead hath no fellow." Strafford had been im-
peached and imprisoned eight days after Parliament convened, and
soon he was brought to trial before the House of Lords. At once
the inadequacy of the law was revealed. The charge was treason

Star of Empire

The radicals wished to abolish the whole episcopacy, root and
branch, although they were far from clear what should replace it.
As their position was expressed by a country member named Oliver
Cromwell, they knew what they did not want but not what they did.
The policy of root and branch shocked the conservatives. They
might dislike the bishops as individuals, but they were defenders of
the episcopal office. The Church was a tree of great age. Almost
everyone agreed that its branches had recently been bearing poor
fruit and needed pruning. But die trunk was sound Elizabethan
wood, and the roots went deep deeper than Henry VIII, than
Becket and Lanfranc and St. Augustine. Root and branch was a
policy of revolution, of sweeping away the known on the chance
that the unknown would be better. Conservatives, much as they
wished for reform, were appalled at this prospect of destruction.

Defense of the episcopacy lay with the Crown, and on this issue
Charles would not capitulate. The one thing needed to bring waver-
ers to his side was that Parliament should try to assume his legal
powers should advance from coercion to usurpation. England
would then be on the road to parliamentary absolutism, a concept
more alien to her tradition than the King's personal rule. Yet to the
leaders of the commons usurpation soon appeared as the only way
to protect everything they held dear, including their own heads. In
self-defense they laid hold of an authority not theirs by any stretch
of the law.

They were impelled by a military crisis in Ireland, The resentment
that Strafford had been sent to suppress broke into flame on his re-
moval, and by the autumn of 1641 the end of British authority
seemed in sight. To Englishmen, whose contempt for the Irish -was
tinged with bigotry and fear, this challenge called for immediate ac-
tion. Troops were needed, but who would command them? The
King had the right, in law and practice, to appoint their officers. If
he were voted the money and allowed to organize the army, how-
ever, it was more likely to be used against the English than the Irish.
Either Parliament would control the military, or the military would
destroy Parliament. The commons demanded control, and the de-
mand was as necessary as it was illegal.

Charles countered with illegality of his own. In January 1642 he
invaded the House with an armed band to seize five leaders of the
opposition. He thus violated a basic privilege of the commons, the

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mental. On the one hand was the principle of freedom, which con-
tained the seeds of anarchy; on the other hand was the principle of
order, which contained the seeds of absolutism. Either side, in tri-
umphing, would endanger the objects for which it fought.

Inevitably, therefore, the fighting was done by minorities. The
bulk of the population remained aloof, out of either apathy or baf-
flement. "The people," said a discouraged Puritan leader, "care not
what government they live under, so as they may plough and go to
market." 7 They waited to have the outcome determined for them.
They might not acquiesce in the verdict of arms, but they would re-
sist, if at all, by their traditional method of passivity.

The Roundheads suffered at the beginning from serious handi-
caps. Officers and privates alike were civilians, unaccustomed to the
requirements of army life, and Puritans were peculiarly difficult to
discipline. "Our soldiers generally manifested their dislike to our
lieutenant-colonel, who is a Goddam blade and doubtless hatched
in hell; and we all desire that either the parliament would depose
him, or God convert him, or the devil fetch him away quick." 8

The King's officers had at least the habit of command, and the
countryman turned foot soldier had the habit of obedience. The roy-r
alist cavalry was a terrifying force; the Cavalier squire, unlike the
Roundhead burgess, had been virtually born to the saddle, and the
King's young nephew, Prince Rupert, was a dashing commander of
horse. But these tactical advantages could not be exploited because
of other factors.

Royalist strength was drawn primarily from the north and west.
These areas were not only far behind the south and east in social
development; they were also poor. The wealth of London was the
mainspring of rebellion, and the capture of London would mean
victory for the King. But he lacked the wherewithal. He had not the
money to hold his armies together for a long campaign, and the en-
thusiasm of his soldiers waned as they got farther from their native
counties. After 1643, when his offensive against the capital bogged
down, the initiative passed to his enemies.

By 1644 a dynamic factor was emerging among the Roundhead

7 Quoted by Keith Eiling: A History of the Tory Party, 1640-1714 (Oxford,
1924), p. 84, n. 1.

8 Quoted by C. H. Firth: Cromwell's Army: a History of the English Soldier
during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate (London and
New York, 1902), p. 280.

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cess, but the problems before them demanded sobriety. Charles was
still King; though he was shorn of power, he was the rallying point
for the numerous factions of discontent. The Cavaliers, although
their spirit was temporarily broken, were too large a segment of the
nation to be ignored, and they would have to be either conciliated
or held down by force. The Anglicans who had taken no part in the
war would oppose any government that did not allow them the use
of the prayer book and the familiar liturgy. The Scots wanted the
whole island made safe for Presbyterianism, and they had many sup-
porters south of Tweed. It is far easier, the victors were discovering,
to make a revolution than to consolidate it.

The worst problem of the Puritan leaders was to agree among
themselves. Their regime rested upon Parliament and the army, and
these two were soon drifting apart. The composition of Parliament
had greatly changed with the withdrawal of the royalist members:
the peers had become negligible, and the Lower House had shrunk
in size. The majority of the commons had taken little part in the
fighting, and looked askance at the army. Strange religious and po-
litical ideas were fermenting there, and the troops cost money; for
both reasons the House wished to be quit of its saviors, preferably
without giving them their arrears of pay. The soldiers, on the other
hand, had no intention of being disbanded; more than pay was at
stake.

Presbyterianism dominated the commons. The members did not
aim at a Scottish kirk, superior even to the legislature, but at a
church run by the state meaning themselves on lines that per-
mitted no deviation in doctrine and discipline. Such an establish-
ment would be no more tolerant than Laud's had been, and for the
Independents no more tolerable. For them, in Milton's words, "new
presbyter is old priest writ large."

The commons reckoned without their host. They had achieved
their position by virtue of the army, and the army was predomi-
nantly Independent. The soldiers desired a church so decentralized
as scarcely to justify .the name, with wide room for varieties of Prot-
estant belief and practice; Parliament desired its own Erastian form
of kirk. Two principles were at loggerheads, and neither side would
give way. In the quarrel the King saw his opportunity. He was still
unable to recognize defeat, and the past six years had only height-
ened his capacity for intrigue; he started negotiating with both

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for better or worse, long after the Ironsides were forgotten, for in
that decade Britain began to assume her position as a great power.
Cromwell's chief claim to her remembrance is not as her one re-
publican ruler but as her first great imperialist.

The government of the Commonwealth, established after Charles's
death, was confronted by the necessity of pacifying the British Isles.
The most immediate problem was Ireland, where Protestants and
Catholics had been momentarily united by a common horror of regi-
cide. The task of dealing with them devolved upon Cromwell, who
was now the pivot of the regime; his only competitor, Fairfax, had
been brushed aside as too conservative. The course that Cromwell
took in Ireland made Elizabethan and Jacobean policy seem like
kindness itself. In the streets of Drogheda his veterans put the de-
fenders to the sword without discrimination or pity, and soon the
whole island learned the terror of these new Israelites. The grim
work continued for several years, and "the curse of Cromwell'* took
hold of the Irish soul.

The settlement was equally ruthless. The government rejected the
policy of plantation for a more drastic method. Irish landholders
who could prove their loyalty were to be moved to the western
province of Connaught; those who could not were to be dispossessed
in favor of Englishmen. This grim design of "hell or Connaught"
was modified because the bulk of the population refused to move
and could not be exterminated. But in two-thirds of the island al-
most all the old landholding class was dispossessed, and its place
taken by English adventurers and soldiers. The latter seldom kept
for long what they had acquired so easily; if they were not mur-
dered by their tenants, they -were bought out by their officers or by
speculators. The result, in the long run, was the creation of numer-
ous large estates held by Englishmen and Scots who were divorced
from the land, and whose chief interest in the peasantry was as a
source of rents. Thus the curse of Cromwell developed into the more
insidious curse of eighteenth-century Ireland, the absentee landlord.

The pacification of Scotland was in the same forceful terms, al-
though the settlement was very different. The Scots rejected the
judgment of the second Civil War, and in 1650 they proclaimed
Charles's son as Charles II, their Presbyterian king. Cromwell struck
them fast and hard. At Dunbar he confronted their army, the cream
of Calvinist orthodoxy; the Kirk had weeded out the ungodly and

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The materials for a navy had been provided by Charles during his
personal rule. He had spent considerable ship money on ships, but
not on their crews. The men had consequently presented the fleet to
Parliament, and it had played an important if inconspicuous role in
the King's downfall. By the end of the wars the Commonwealth
found itself with one of the finest navies in Europe, and promptly
took measures to improve it further. The result was a fighting force
such as the British had not seen before and were not to see again for
generations.

The republicans learned the uses of sea power by necessity. At
the end of the second Civil War Prince Rupert took to the ocean to
prey on commerce, and the Channel and Scilly Islands became nests
of royalist privateers; these ships without a country were pirates in
the eyes of the government, but the other maritime powers were
tempted to treat them as the last representatives of legitimacy. In
America the colonists were inclined to use the Ring's death as an
excuse for asserting their autonomy. The Commonwealth used its
fleet to good purpose. Robert Blake, who had behind him a brilliant
record as an army commander, chased Rupert to the Tagus and into
the Mediterranean; Portugal, Spain, and France began at once to
doubt the propriety of harboring commerce-raiders. Another squad-
ron crossed the Atlantic; Barbados promptly returned to its alle-
giance, and the appearance of two ships off the Virginia coast
brought that colony to heel. "The strong arm of England," as Palm-
erston called it two centuries later, was felt for the first time in areas
far from her home waters.

Her immediate naval concern, however, was still with the narrow
seas. Cromwell hoped to win the allegiance of the merchant classes
by furthering British prosperity according to the precepts of mer-
cantilism. The total of world trade was considered as a fixed quan-
tity, so that one nation could increase its own share only at the cost
of its rivals. This eventually meant war. The first stage in the strug-
gle, for an ambitious power, was to monopolize its own carrying
trade, in order to impoverish its competitors and build up the mer-
chant marine from which its navy was manned. The second stage
was naked force, used to destroy enemy fleets, cripple enemy com-
merce, and seize the colonies that fed commerce. Prosperity through
trade was the end, according to this view, and war the principal
means.

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the policy o neutrals and the arrogance of the Barbary pirates. In
these ^0 respects the Spanish War, minor in itself, presaged mo-
mentous developments. On the one hand it began the long struggle
for control of the Caribbean, first against Spain and then against
France, a struggle that grew until it became the focus of imperial
rivalries. On the other hand the war demonstrated the importance
of dominating Mediterranean waters, and so was a prelude to the
later extension of British power from Gibraltar eastward to Al-
exandria.

The Cromwellian use of the fleet, in summary, evolved through
three successive stages. The first was an extension of the victory won
on land the elimination of royalism on the seas and in the colonies.
The second was the offensive against the Dutch, waged for geo-
graphical reasons in home waters. The third was the assault on the
Spanish empire, during which the focus shifted to distant oceans.
In the Channel and North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean,
Cromwell's sailors began constructing the edifice of modern British
power.

His soldiers, on the other hand, constructed only a jerry-built edi-
fice. It was imposing at first sight, but it rested on the sands of coer-
cion. Only in Ireland, where the sands had been packed down by
long usage, did parts of it survive for centuries. In Scotland the
building scarcely outlasted the builder, and a later generation had to
reconstruct it on another foundation. In England the fabric had its
crucial test; if the English part had been solidly fashioned, the rest
might have stood. Instead the whole structure collapsed as soon as
Cromwell was out of the way.

He became a dictator in spite of himself. "That you have by
force," he had said in 1647, "I look upon it as nothing. I do not know
that force is to be used except we cannot get what is for the good of
the kingdom without force.** The exception is revealing. In what did
the good of the kingdom consist? Subsequent events showed that it
did not, for the revolutionaries, consist in a king, who was defeated
and beheaded; nor in an established church, which was abolished;
nor in the dualism of lords and commons, since the Upper House
was eliminated and the Lower House purged by the army. It con-
sisted in a republic, arrived at by consulting only those few who
wielded power. Cromwell was almost as often the agent as the mas-
ter of that small group, but he personified its will. That will deter-

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was brought to trial for challenging the rule of the military; in both
cases he was more than a match for his antagonists, and was acquit-
ted in the face of law and evidence. He became the hero of the hour
not because his notion of democracy was understood by the peo-
ple, but because he expressed a defiance they dared not imitate.

The army itself had been penetrated by the Levellers' propa-
ganda. Pressure from the ranks for a new Parliament, democratically
elected, became difficult for even Cromwell to withstand, and the
attitude of the Rump increased his difficulty. Its members were a
self-important lot, fond of power, loath to relinquish it, and distrust-
ful of the military. They refused to have an election forced on them,
and took up the alternative of perpetuating themselves by co-option.
At that point Cromwell's patience snapped. Backed by a squad of
soldiers, he first berated and then dissolved the Rump.

This coup d'etat, in the spring of 1653, ended the Commonwealth.
The Protectorate that followed was based on the first and only writ-
ten constitution in British history, the Instrument of Government. It
was drawn up by the army officers; it contained the act of union
with Scotland, and provided for a Lord Protector, a permanent
council, and occasional parliaments. But by now any legislature was
sure to conflict with the executive. The first Parliament that Crom-
well called as Lord Protector quarreled with him over control of the
army, and he dissolved it.

The year that followed revealed the true foundation of the re-
gime. The island was divided into military districts, in which order
was maintained and taxes were collected by the troops. The slow
evolution of a civilian society had given place to military dictator-
ship. In the long run this experience confirmed and perpetuated the
British aversion to a standing army; in the short run it completed
the ruin of the Protectorate. The traditional governing class, still in-
fluential in town and country, was as much opposed to the idea of
centralization as it had been under the King, and Oliver's soldiers
were more detested, because more efficient than Charles's messen-
gers. The forces of localism had aided the Puritan cause; now they
were turned against it. When Cromwell called another Parliament,
it contained so many plotting malcontents that at the beginning of
1658 he was forced to another dissolution. Once more government
rested on his influence over the army.

In September his death ushered in confusion. His son, who suc-

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King alone had proved unworkable, and no monarch in his senses
would repeat the experiment unless he could find some alternative
to a parliamentary income. Government by Parliament alone had
proved even more disastrous; once the Church and monarchy had
been destroyed, lords and commons had soon vanished in their turn.
The basic constitutional problem had been defined but not resolved.
Government would have to be by the Crown in Parliament; al-
though the two could no longer be a fused power, as in the days of
the Tudors, each was patently indispensable. The remaining task
was to work out a relationship between them that would change
peacefully with changing conditions.

In the Church the revolution had shattered the principle of uni-
formity. Elizabeth's broad establishment had given place first to a
narrow Laudianism and then to an equally narrow Presbyterianism;
the presbyters had been succeeded by the Independents, with a the-
ory of tolerance that broke down in practice. Their fall did not mean
a return to the old system or a new age of toleration, but a struggle
between embittered factions. That struggle the Anglicans were sure
to win temporarily, because the forces of reaction fought for them;
their Church was identified with the returning dynasty. But their
victory would not recreate a national communion. The Puritans,
whether Presbyterian or Independent, had had their day of power
and had grown in numbers and confidence; they could be perse-
cuted, but not driven back into the Anglican fold. The Church of
England could never again be the church of all England, and it
could purport to be so only at its peril the peril of obdurate men,
watching and 'waiting for the day when the Lord would once more
deliver His saints. *1 will bring my people again, as I did from
Bashan; mine own will I bring again, as I did sometime from the
deep of the sea." 14

In the field of power the Puritans had made one of their most last-
ing contributions. Their army had a negative but important effect:
it drove into the marrow of the British bone an antipathy to "sword
government." As a result public opinion became consistently op-
posed to a large professional army, and at the beginning of each ma-
jor war Britain has had to improvise a military machine. Improvisa-
tion has contributed to a series of disasters, from Klosterzeven to
Dunkirk; it has also contributed incalculably to the growth of f ree-

i* Psalm 68. 22.

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largely established by the revolution, had not been embodied in ad-
rninistrative practice. Without the routine of practice and the cus-
tomary law that ripens out of it the principle itself was insecure. It
could be reasserted against an aggressive king only by force, the an-
tithesis of legal process.

For this reason the equilibrium of Restoration politics was inher-
ently delicate. It could not be maintained unless Parliament and the
sovereign treated each other with phenomenal tact, compromising
difficulties and curtailing demands for the sake of stable govern-
ment. In the early days such forbearance seemed possible. Many
men shared the optimism of Lord Clarendon, the conservative Cav-
alier who was the King's chief minister, when he urged the members
of Parliament to restore the country "to its old good manners, its
old good humor, and its old good nature good nature, a virtue so
peculiar to you that it can be translated into no other language, and
hardly practiced by any other people/" 1

The hope of this restoration was illusory. New issues added fuel
to old hatreds, until good nature was consumed in the blaze. The
unanimity with which the nation had welcomed its returning King
soon gave place to the strife of factions, in which Charles could
scarcely remain neutral. Inevitably some factions grouped them-
selves about him while others drew together in opposition, and out
of this grouping developed two political parties. If the court party
controlled a majority in the House of Commons, the constitutional
problem of the relation between King and Parliament might remain
in abeyance. But if the opposition gained control, or if the court
lost the backing of its party, that problem would become the stuff
of revolution.

During the 166ffs no such danger was evident. The focus of poli-
tics was the religious question; the first election of the new reign
had produced a legislature more intolerantly Anglican than Charles
or Clarendon, and this Cavalier Parliament endured for eighteen
years. Its members were determined to establish the predominance
of the Church of England beyond future questioning, and they
were ready, for all their loyalty, to force their program on a reluc-
tant King. They did so in the legislation known collectively, if un-
fairly, as the Clarendon Code. It virtually denied to the Puritans
the right to preach or teach, to hold municipal office, or to worship

* Quoted by Felling: History of the Tory Party, p. 69.

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the Dutch and the British, and their interest in keeping him out
brought them together against their will. He was forced to suspend
his aggression until he had settled accounts with the Dutch, and for
that purpose he had to break their new accord with Britain.

Here was Charles's opportunity to experiment with selling Brit-
ish foreign policy in return for domestic power. He asked Louis for
enough French money to free him from the leading strings of Parlia-
ment, and for French troops whenever the time was ripe to declare
himself a Roman Catholic; in return he offered to assist in the de-
struction of the Netherlands. The cousins came to a secret agree-
ment, and in 1672 they joined forces in the third Dutch War. Charles
was playing a subtle game, masked by appearances. He seemed to
be merely implementing his subjects* old antagonism against the
Netherlands. Until they realized that anti-Dutch was pro-French,
and that France was the great danger, they could scarcely suspect
that he was betraying them.

Simultaneously Charles tried a bold course in domestic affairs. He
had two oppressed minorities to work with, the dissenters and the
recusants; much as they disliked each other, they and he had a
common antipathy to the church established by Parliament, and he
hoped to win their support for a prerogative that would deliver
them from statutes. In 1672, by a declaration of indulgence, he sus-
pended the Clarendon Code and the penal laws against Roman
Catholics, and established freedom of worship throughout the king-
dom. The declaration derived in law from an old claim that the sov-
ereign might halt at will the operation of a statute. "General laws
made publicly in Parliament," James I had asserted years before,
"may . . . by his authority be mitigated and suspended upon causes
only known to him/* Charles confined his claim for the moment to
the ecclesiastical sphere, but no one could tell how far it might go.
If some acts of Parliament were at the mercy of the Crown, what
were the limits of prerogative? The King had rubbed the ancient
lamp of the constitution and had conjured up a demon.

These two experiments, in foreign and religious policy, were
Charles's way of testing the national pulse. If it had remained nor-
mal, he would doubtless have gone on toward his coup d'etat. In-
stead he raised such a fever of excitement that he was thrown onto
the defensive for years to come. Even the dissenters rejected his in-
dulgence; they rightly suspected a move toward Rome, which they

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grew slowly, stimulated by many factors. Louis posed as the cham-
pion of Rome; his successes made all Protestants uneasy, whether
they were Presbyterian Scots or English Cavaliers. The energies of
France were also turning into commercial and imperial expansion,
and her navy was growing. British mercantilists began to see in her
a greater and more dangerous Netherlands, against whom the only
defense might be war. Such factors give increasing weight to the
foreign problem.

As the years went by, the question of friendship or war with
France became more and more closely interwoven with internal
questions, and they all grew more pressing. When they came to a
head in 1688, three years after Charles's death, the nation was con-
fronted with a choice between two courses. One involved a great
war in Europe and the triumph of the oligarchs over prerogative at
home; the other involved the continuance of neutrality at the price
of a Roman-Catholic absolutism. Thus the three central themes of
Restoration politics, the religious, the constitutional, and the diplo-
matic, came together and were settled together. This was the end
of the process that began with Charles's experiments.

II Tory and Whig

THE PRIMARY factor in bringing the three themes together was
the dynastic problem. The key members of the House of Stuart, their
characters, marriages, children or lack of children, were parts of a
single question: who would succeed to the Crown, and how would
he or she use its powers? On the answer depended in large meas-
ure the fate of the Church of England, the outcome of the struggle
between Parliament and prerogative, and the role of Britain in
Europe.

The dynastic crisis first exploded in 1678, and it can best be un-
derstood by an introduction to the Stuart family as it was at that
time. Charles had no legitimate children, and refused to divorce his
wife in order to produce one; among his bastards none was politi-
cally significant except the Duke of Monmouth, a young man who
had inherited his father's charm without his brains. The King's le-
gal successor was his brother James, the Duke of York, a declared
recusant and married to a Roman Catholic. She had borne him no

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or the French, but his royalism made him their reluctant apologist;
he was forced to argue that a king's relations with his confessor and
his cousin were a small price to pay for legitimacy. He was also
forced to argue that the hereditary prerogative was indefeasible
and immune to the authority of Parliament - in other words to res-
urrect the ghost of divine right. But he was a conservative, not a
reactionary. He had little desire to restore the Crown's old author-
ity, least of all in the church; he knew from experience that it would
be used to succor the recusants and dissenters, whom he detested.
His position was riddled with dilemmas. He was Anglican to the
marrow, yet championed the cause of a Roman-Catholic heir; he
had the true-born Englishman's dislike of the French, yet supported
a monarchy that had obvious ties with Louis; he emphasized the
prerogative, yet tried to lock the church against it.
' The Whig position was less paradoxical. It derived much of its
premise from the moderate Puritans of 1642 the distrust of gov-
ernment, particularly royal government, and the emphasis upon the
sovereignty of Parliament. Although the Whig was as much an An-
glican as the Tory, he was far more tolerant of dissent. Divine right
he considered an anachronism, and the legality of the succession
concerned him far less than the danger from James's religion and
his tie with France. The leading Whigs were beginning to suspect
the pattern of Louis' design, and to realize vaguely but less
vaguely than the Tories that it must be opposed while there was
still time. Effective opposition was impossible while either of Louis'
cousins was on the throne. Charles might be endured for the few
years left to him, but the Whigs gradually concluded that they
could not gamble on admitting his brother even conditionally. Par-
liament, which had beheaded one king and recalled a second, must
now debar a third; woe to Charles if he stood in the way.

On whom, then, would the crown devolve? This question put the
Whigs in a quandary. They advanced the cause of the Duke of Mon-
mouth, even though the idea of a bastard king outraged the deep-
est political emotions of the people; the Whig leaders would scarcely
have suggested him if the alternative had not been equally unwel-
come. If James's daughter Mary was acceptable in herself, her hus-
band was not. Collaborating with the Dutch against Louis was one
thing; bringing in a Dutchman as prince consort, let alone as joint
sovereign, was quite another. William, though half Stuart, was a f or-

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Succeeding times did equal folly call,
Believing nothing, or believing all. 3

The King and the Whigs were exceptions to Dryden's first state-
ment. Charles was too wise to be puzzled, but he was powerless; he
could only lie low and hope that the storm would blow over with-
out destroying the dynasty. The Whigs were pleased because they
were not fools: truth or lies, here was their opportunity. The Tory
majority in Parliament was aghast at the revelations, and the Whigs
at last had the chance of forcing through their program. Within six
weeks of Oates's bombshell, they brought into debate the question
of exclusion. Simultaneously they got wind of Charles's latest finan-
cial dealings with France, and promptly impeached his chief min-
ister. The trial threatened to make the Crown as much the defend-
ant as in Stafford's case, and Charles was at last forced to dissolve
the Cavalier Parliament. The Whigs went to the electorate and were
returned in triumph. They believed that they had a mandate to save
the nation from popery, and if necessary from its King.

Charles was now forced into the open to meet the storm. The
commons were bent on exclusion, but he could determine whether
and when they met. For two years he frustrated them by proroga-
tions and dissolutions, until the Whig extremists were ready to de-
stroy him along with his brother. They reckoned without two fac-.
tors, Louis and the English squirearchy. The French King preferred
Tory isolationism to the Whigs* suspicious hostility, and he paid for
his preference by giving Charles another secret subsidy. The rural
gentry, appalled at the chaos the Whigs were precipitating, turned
instinctively to the Crown as the source of order. In 1681 Charles,
with the dual backing of French gold and Tory swords, dissolved
Parliament for the last time. The Whigs had overreached them-
selves in attempting their partisan revolution, and their cause was
shattered for the King's lifetime. It could be revived only if his
brother destroyed the elements of strength out of which Charles had
made his counterrevolution.

The remaining four years of the reign were the last Stuart experi-
ment in personal rule. It rested on a broader base than that of
Charles I; the son had lost the father's instruments of prerogative,
but he had acquired a party. The Tories supported him and his

3 John Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel

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to examine it, to weigh their new principle against their loyalty to
the state and church that he was attacking. The principle evap-
orated.

At the start James profited by an assault on municipal liberties
that Charles had begun. The method was to coerce the boroughs by
rescinding or threatening to rescind their charters, in order to secure
docile burgesses in the House of Commons. The result was a packed
Parliament, which turned out to be docile only within limits, and for
which a price had been paid in the alienation of the local mag-
istracy. From this Parliament James sought and obtained the where-
withal for a standing army.

His pretext was the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth. That
young man had had his head turned by the Whigs, and their fall
had not taught him wisdom. His rising was crushed in a single bat-
tle; he was executed and his peasant followers proscribed. The King,
like Mary before him, was deceived by his triumph into thinking
that a loyal people would follow his lead in religion. He retained an
army of thirty thousand and attempted to officer it with recusants
(in defiance of the Test Act) while his priests converted the men.
The attempt made little headway, but the troops encamped on the
outskirts of London revived the dark fears of 1641.

The conversion of the government and church proceeded on sim-
ilar lines. Those who would not change their religion were replaced
by those who would; soon the Roman, not the Anglican, eucharist
became the real test for office. In the Church a prerogative court
was reconstituted in defiance of statute; the Crown, not content
with this, reasserted its dispensing power by another declaration of
indulgence. James's purpose, like Charles's, was to woo the dissent-
ers, but again they refused to accept toleration in company with rec-
usants. The King could not have undermined his position more
effectively.

The Tories were in an impossible dilemma. They had expected
James to keep his religion to himself; instead he was perverting the
church and defying the law for the sake of popery. They had also
expected to enjoy the fruits of office, but when they held to their
faith they were dismissed to join the ostracized Whigs. The only
consolation was that the King could not live forever, and that his
successor was Mary. In June 1688, however, even this solace van-
ished: James's second wife finally bore him a son. The child took

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ure at Versailles, but for the British it settled a number of awkward
problems. Even the Tories admitted that a king who had decamped
had in effect abdicated. After long argument and some legal leger-
demain, William and Mary were recognized by Parliament as joint
sovereigns. James and his infant son became pensioners of Louis.
The revolution was accomplished, and France acquired the rival
who fought her throughout the world until the Battle of Waterloo.

The Glorious Revolution differed from the Puritan in being virtu-
ally unanimous. The Whigs and Tories who summoned William dis-
liked each other as much as ever, but under the threat of civil dis-
integration and foreign danger they dared not continue their old
quarrels. The Whigs were forced to forget that the Tories had ar-
gued for despotism. The Tories were forced to adopt the Whig can-
didates for the throne, and simultaneously to come to terms with
dissent. The dissenters had spurned James and supported his over-
throw; in return they had been promised toleration by the Whigs
and even by leading churchmen, and the Tories were obliged to ac-
quiesce in fulfilling the promise. The party lost at one stroke the di-
vinity that had hedged its king and its church.

The Glorious Revolution also differed from the Puritan in being
carried through by conservatives. The oligarchs wished to retain
what they had already 'won; when the Crown attacked their liber-
ties and power, they defended them by changing the wearer of the
crown so quickly that no crack appeared in the social crust for the
lava of radicalism. They did not wish to change the nature of mon-
archy but to conserve what they understood it to be, and the bounds
they set upon it were intended to define rather than curtail its scope.

Curtailment, however, was implicit in the act of definition. James
had violated the law as his subjects conceived it, by exercising royal
powers that they thought had lapsed. Despite all the work of the
Roundheads and of the Restoration Cavaliers the prerogative had
turned out to be elastic, and had been stretched beyond the nation's
endurance. Its boundaries had to be set again, and this time they
were set explicitly and permanently. The outstanding act was the
Bill of Rights in 1689, but it was supplemented by a series of statutes
over the next twelve years. In their entirety they constitute the rev-
olutionary settlement, the basis on which the modern British con-
stitution has been built.

The settlement, although bipartisan, was a triumph of Whig ideas.

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generation between 1660 and 1689 intolerance had kept the country
teetering on the edge of civil war, until temperate men were ready
to cry plague on the contentions of Anglicans, recusants, and dis-
senters. A second cause was the need for unity. Britain could no
longer afford domestic turmoil; Protestants of whatever breed had
to hang together in the face of France, and wisdom suggested mak-
ing even the lot of the recusants bearable before desperation drove
them to treason. Thus the new spirit was compounded in part of at-
trition and expediency.

It was compounded also of logic. Religious persecution had rested
on the premise that some body of men, whether an apostolic church
or the regiment of the elect, possessed a monopoly of God's truth
and the only way of salvation; those who thought differently had to
be converted or exterminated because they were pestilential: they
carried a contagious heresy of which the faithful would sicken and
be damned, and God might pour His wrath upon the society that
harbored them. This was the logic of intolerance. The British had
never accepted it in its full implication, but it had played its part in
their history from the autos-da-fe of Queen Mary to the frenzies of
the Popish Plot. Now its premise was being undermined by expe-
rience and reason.

Experience suggested that no faith incurred the particular wrath
of the Almighty. The great testing ground for religious diversity
was the coast of North America, which by now had settlements
ranging from Roman Catholic to Quaker; no colony, whatever its
complexion, had been marked out for particular divine displeasure.
Reason suggested that in God's house there might be mansions for
many creeds. If this were so, persecution rested on an error that the
Christian must reject as sinful and the rationalist as absurd.

Of all the tyrannies on human kind,

The worst is that which persecutes the mind.

Let us but weigh at what offense we strike;

*Tis but because we cannot think alike.

In punishing of this, we overthrow

The laws of nations and of nature too. 4

The leaven of rationalism was at work in the upper classes, pre-
paring the way for great intellectual changes. The Restoration ap-
pears in retrospect as a transitional period between two worlds of

4 John Dryden: The Hind and the Panther.

Star of Empire

the Boyne, but they did not gain even the solace of free worship. To
make matters worse, the English Parliament soon undermined Ire-
land's economy. Her wool trade was beginning to prosper and to
compete with English cloth, and was consequently strangled by pro-
hibitive tariffs. Long years of hardship and oppression followed for
recusant and Protestant alike, and thousands emigrated. They car-
ried with them, to Europe and America, an enduring hatred of Brit-
ain and her works.

The subjugation of Ireland virtually concluded the revolution.
But conclusion, as the British had found in 1660, was not final set-
tlement. Much had been accomplished. The prerogative had been
subordinated to the will of the oligarchy and the focus of the con-
stitution shifted beyond question to the House of Commons; the lo-
cal magistrates had defended their autonomy against the encroach-
ment of central power; dissent had achieved a measure of freedom;
Ireland had been conquered again. For the next quarter-century,
however, these gains were insecure. At almost any moment the
whirligig of time might have brought in his revenges.

The principal causes of insecurity were two, the foreign wars and
dynastic accident. Except for a five-year truce Britain was fighting
Louis XIV continuously from 1688 to 1713, and Louis was the
avowed champion first of James, then of his son; a military disaster
might have opened the way to a restoration backed by French arms.
The Tories were impelled by their whole tradition to deplore the
results of the revolution and to dream of a time when the Grown
and the Church would regain their own; the time seemed to be ap-
proaching because the line enthroned by the revolution was unable
to perpetuate itself. William and Mary were childless, and Mary died
in 1694. Of the numerous children of her younger sister, Anne, the
last died in 1700; the dynasty thereafter consisted of an ageing wid-
ower and his middle-aged sister-in-law. These two factors, the wars
and the royal family, produced tensions and uncertainties from the
coronation of William and Mary to the death of Anne, and the pe-
riod can best be understood by considering the two in turn.

IV The Duel with Louis XIV

FOR the first time since the fifteenth century Britain was engaging
in a major struggle on the Continent, and on its outcome hinged the

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rope. If an Austrian Hapsburg inherited the Spanish crowns, the
old empire of Charles V would be virtually recreated; if a French
Bourbon succeeded instead, a Franco-Spanish combine would
stretch from the borders of Holland to the coast of Peru. In either
case the balance of power, on the Continent and overseas, would be
profoundly altered.

Statesmen were confronted with a kind of problem that was des-
tined to recur throughout the eighteenth century. A state had be-
come too -weak to maintain itself; how to dispose of it without up-
setting the European applecart? The age of religious wars had given
place to the age of anarchy, in which each of the powers was ab-
sorbed, behind an ornate screen of legalism, diplomacy, and wars,
with the simple and amoral aim of furthering its own position at the
cost of its neighbors. In such an age weakness was an invitation to
rapacity. The Spaniards could not expect their empire to survive in
its traditional form; the only question was whether it would be sub-
ordinated to one of their strong neighbors or to several. If it were
partitioned among the claimants, change might come peacefully. If
any one contender sought the whole, he would be opposed by every
state with an interest in the balance of power, and change would
come by war.

The initial choice rested with Louis because he alone had the
force to defy the rest of Europe. At first he inclined to moderation.
He and King William negotiated an agreement for partitioning the
inheritance between the Archduke Charles of Hapsburg and Louis*
grandson, Philip of Anjou, cadets who seemed safely remote from
their own family crowns. But neither Austria nor Spain accepted the
agreement. The dying Spanish King, eager to maintain the empire
intact, willed the whole of it to Philip with the proviso that in case
of refusal the whole should go to Charles. Louis was in a difficult
position. He could either accept the bequest and fight for the whole
of it, or fight Austria for the share assigned to Philip by the parti-
tion treaty. He chose to accept the whole in Philip's name. French
armies entered the Spanish Netherlands, and almost simultaneously
James II died in exile; Louis, as if to complete the ring of his ene-
mies, acknowledged James's son as King of England and Scotland.
He was defying all the powers.

For the British a dynastic union of France and Spain threatened
to be catastrophic. French influence was paramount in the Spanish

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liance had worn him out. The alliance might have died with him if
he had not found a worthy successor to carry it on.

John Churchill, better known as the Duke of Marlborough, had
risen in life by a combination of merit and opportune coat-turning.
He had won favor with King James and then deserted him, then in-
trigued with him while serving King William; his political morality
was that of his day. But he was indispensable because he had gen-
ius. As a diplomat he was William's equal in patience, perseverance,
and acumen, and he had a power to charm men that the King never
possessed. As a soldier he was probably the outstanding figure in
British military annals. The functioning of the coalition required a
great diplomat and a great general, and the two were now fused in
one man. His fame grew until it not only eclipsed William's, but
outshone that of the Sun King himself among the children of
France; they still sing of the day when "Mcdbrough sen va-t-en
guerre"

The principal theaters of war were the Low Countries, Germany,
Italy, and Spain, Of these, from the British viewpoint, the last was
the most disappointing. The Spanish people showed a preference
for Philip as against the Archduke, and the British discovered as
Napoleon rediscovered a century later that thwarting their pref-
erence in kings was an expensive undertaking. French armies were
in possession, and the allied attempts to oust them by sea-borne in-
vasions were unsuccessful. These attempts, however, forced the
British fleet to operate for long periods off the Spanish coast, and
its need for bases led to two developments.

In 1703 the British concluded a treaty with Portugal whereby
that small state became an allied beachhead. Britain paid by a com-
mercial agreement that soon had the effect of converting her upper
classes from French claret to port a change in drinking habits in-
duced by military logic. The same logic, a century later, revived the
Anglo-Portuguese alliance against Napoleon.

For an effective peninsular war Britain needed to control the Med-
iterranean coast as well as the Atlantic, and Lisbon was too distant
a base for operations inside the straits. In 1704 the British surprised
and captured the Rock of Gibraltar; four years later they seized the
Spanish island of Minorca. These two positions complemented each
other. From Minorca the British could blockade the main French
fleet at Toulon, and from Gibraltar they could detect any large-

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Bourbon kingdoms was mitigated when Spain ceded Gibraltar and
Minorca, for with those bases the Royal Navy might prevent a junc-
tion of the Franco-Spanish squadrons in the Mediterranean with
those in the Atlantic. Thus Britain strengthened her sea power in
Europe, her empire in America. A generation later she was ready to
begin the climactic phase of her struggle with France.

V The Duel of Tory and Whig

THE REGIME established by the revolution justified itself in the
wars against Louis, and at their close its position would normally
have been secure. But dynastic uncertainty was generating internal
friction within the regime and waking the old feuds of Whig and
Tory. Partisan strife, which had already affected the conduct of the
wars and the negotiation of the Utrecht settlement, was approach-
ing a climax that jeopardized the fruits of the revolution.

James had given the old Tory party a mortal blow. His use of the
prerogative against the church had made devout royalists into split
personalities, and most of them had sacrificed their political to their
ecclesiastical loyalty. A few, including some highly placed church-
men, refused to traffic with revolution and remained true to the
principles the party had had at the time of James's accession; they
were therefore known as Jacobites. Their concept of prerogative
was logical, but they were automatically excluded from power. For
the majority of the party the situation was reversed. They retained
great power, because William owed his throne as much to them as
to the Whigs, but they had no basis in logic. Their best minds work-
ing together could not reconstruct the Humpty Dumpty of preroga-
tive, and the concept of Anglicanism on which they had stood for
half a century was cracked apart by toleration. No political philos-
ophy could be built upon such wreckage.

The Tories* attitude, in consequence, was essentially negative.
They devoted themselves to restricting the benefits that dissenters
derived from the Toleration Act. They cooled to the idea of fighting
France and reverted to isolationism. They made life difficult for
William, particularly after Mary's death weakened the aura of le-
gitimacy about the throne. Although they welcomed the accession
of a more genuine Stuart in Anne, she did not give them the power
they craved: Marlborough found them difficult colleagues for carry-

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shrewd bargain; the English had their Bands o

i. n 1704

threat of defiance at home might force them into
the Scottish Parliament secured the Protestant succession with one
startling proviso: that unless Scotland were assured of complete
freedom for her government, religion, and trade, her new sovereign
should be different from England's. This declaration of mdepend-
ence, taken at face value, meant that the two countries would draw
apart again, reversing the trend of the past century. If the break
came during the war, Britain might be reduced to chaos for the

benefit of France.

The alternative was to draw together on conditions that satisfied
the Scots. Plans for a political union had long been debated but had
made no headway against the stubborn nationalism on both sides of
the border; now internationalism was the one road of escape from
disruption. The plans were quickly revived, and in 1707 the Act of
Union passed both Parliaments. It created a single government for
the whole of Great Britain, abolished all internal customs barriers
(thereby forming the largest free-trade area in Europe), gave the
Scots other economic concessions, and guaranteed them their law
and their church. Thus the long process of integration, begun in the
sixteenth century, was concluded in the eighteenth. The House of
Stuart had brought the two kingdoms closer by assuming both
crowns in 1603, and the impending extinction of that house com-
pleted the work.

The union was far from popular, for nationalism dies slowly. Scot
and Englishman long continued to dislike each other, but both prof-
ited from their partnership. The fierce, parochial pride of the Scots
was converted, once they received the freedom of the island and the
empire, into the pride of building that larger community, and Eng-
lishmen found in their new compatriots a shrewdness and tenacity
that complemented their own. At the price of national sovereignty
the two peoples bought their future greatness.

The Act of Union extended the English dynastic settlement to the
new Kingdom of Great Britain. But the prospects of die Hanoveri-
ans still depended on the winds of political chance, which within
three years began to turn cold. Anne was a Tory at bottom, devoted
to the prerogative and the church; she was beguiled only for a time
into the company of the Whigs. By 1710 she was tiring of them, and
her change of heart weighed heavily on the political scales. The sov-

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war had teen ended satisfactorily, if not gloriously,
toent Great Britain emerged as a European power of a stature
iTwouTd have amazed the Jacobean*. Although her success was
ta rapine than the Whigs would have had it, Tory moderation
SrTaLges. Her gaL were commensurate wi* ^new
position, but they were not great enough to expose her-as the
next great settlement did -to the envy of all Europe.

Thf signing of the treaty left the government face to face with its
^ble^roblem. Anne was nearing her end, and at her deattwho
would succeed her -her remote cousin from the wnlds of Germany
or her papist half-brother from France? The Hanoverian accession
would mean, on the plane of theory, the triumph of de facto mon-
archy and therefore of Whig ideas; no myth of divine nght hedged
Sophia or her son, the Elector George. On the practical plane the
House of Hanover was ill disposed toward the ministry, which had
given its claims only cursory recognition; in the spring of 1714 the
Electress Sophia received such a brusque communication from
Whitehall that the old lady supposedly died of the shock. Such
treatment in itself, without the whole record of the Tory party, was
enough to turn George into a Whig. His accession threatened to ex-
tinguish the principles of Toryism and end the careers of the

ministers.

Yet what alternative was there? James, the Stuart pretender, was
a Roman Catholic; the Tories could not help him to the throne
without abandoning their ideal of a church that monopolized power
by persecuting both dissenters and recusants. James was also tied to
France, and the memory of his father and uncle was still so fresh
that no responsible politician could advocate endangering the align-
ment of British foreign policy and the balance newly established at
Utrecht by crowning another Francophile king. The Hanoverian ac-
cession, in short, would solidify and perpetuate the revolution in a
way that was peculiarly Whig; a restoration of the legitimate Stuart
line promised a return to the troubled days before 1688. The Tories
hoped for a middle course, a limited and moderate counterrevolu-
tion, but they had no middle candidate.

At the end they turned for leadership to Viscount Bolingbroke,
whose daring matched his ambition. In the summer of 1714 he set
out to fill key civil and military positions with his henchmen, appar-
ently in order to obtain such a hold on power before the Queen

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repeal of the legislation against dissent was followed by

The Church of

repe

of the penalties imposed by the Clarendon Code. The
England came to terms with a materialistic and rafaonal age. The
spiritual current in the clergy grew shallower as it grew broader, un-
til holy orders became merely another profession for the gentry.

Wealth accumulated at an increasing rate from trade and manu-
factures, but men did not decay. The common people were ruled by
their betters, and oppressed by them up to a point; beyond that
point, however, docility vanished in rioting. Because central and lo-
cal government was still carried on without effective force, the rul-
ers of the new age were still dependent on consent. Their misuse of
power was limited by a knowledge, periodically refreshed by vio-
lence of the people whom they governed, and their triumph over
the Crown had not uprooted them from the soil out of which they

had grown.

Land remained the basis of good society. Money in itseli meant
little; money discreetly and patiently used meant admittance to the
ruling class. A London merchant, for example, might make a for-
tune in trade; that alone was unlikely to get him more than a munici-
pal office and perhaps election to Parliament as a member for Mid-
dlesex. If he wished to found a dynasty his first step was to buy a
country estate, preferably in an area where the titled families had
more children than income and were willing to barter the one for
the other; he might then arrange suitable marriages for his sons and
daughters. He himself, in all likelihood, would never be admitted to
county society. But his children would be, by right of their husbands
or wives, and his grandchildren by right of birth.

In another way also the merchant class was acquiring new blood
from the aristocracy. At a time when families were large and primo-
geniture was still the rule, few even among the magnates could pro-
vide for a brood of children beyond adolescence. An earl with six
sons had to plan carefully. The estates would be entailed upon the
eldest, who would also inherit the title; his future was secure, al-
thougjh he needed a careful education for his responsibilities. The
earl and the countess would probably have at least a bishop and a
general among their relatives; in that case the Church and the army
would offer good prospects of advancement for the second and third
sons. But what of the other three? Family influence could not be
overworked. If the earl had no other professional connections, he

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were known as his "interest," and their numbers determined his po-
Stfluence. Government was conducted by a judzcious blend of

blend produced surprisingly stable administration, and one
of ^reasonslas again the rotten borough. The greatest lando^er
in Britain and therefore the greatest potential borough-monger was

r

sef. Anne, as already mentioned, had used

influence to support ministers of her choosing, but neither of the first
two Georges knew or cared enough about the complicated game to
play it actively. The royal boroughs passed into the control of the
ministry, which used them to strengthen its hold on the House of
Commons. Thus the mere possession of office gave toe ministerial
clique a great advantage over the opposition.

Another reason for administrative stability was the control of
honors and patronage. Advancement to or in the peerage, promotion
in the Church, in the army and navy, in the civil service-all in
practice depended largely upon the favor of the ministers, who ex-
ercised favor in return for political support. Ike maximum length of
a session of Parliament was seven years, and in that time the price
of most members of the commons could be ascertained. One man
might have a son in the Church who clamored for a deanery or
bishopric; a second was perhaps a commodore eager to be an ad-
miral, and a third had an impecunious relation whose demands
could be stilled by a sinecure in the customs service; a fourth might
crave advancement from the peerage of Ireland to that of Great
Britain. With such men the ministry could bargain favors against
votes, and so build up a phalanx of henchmen.

By now the focus of government was the cabinet. For generations
this inner council of ministers had been acquiring more and more
executive power. No other solution existed for the constitutional di-
lemma; the principle that the commons were supreme had little
meaning until the executive was responsible in fact to them and
only in theory to the sovereign. This change in the status of cabinet
members was still incomplete, but it was far advanced.

By 1714 certain practices had become rooted in custom. The
members of the cabinet were chosen from leaders of the party that
had a majority in the Lower House; they made unanimous recom-
xaendations to the sovereign, for which they were collectively ac-
countable, and a dissenting member was expected to resign. The

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for the modem system was **> coherent

paries. WiL* well-knit opposition, possessed of pn^^J
program, the majority breaks into factions; cabmets -J"^
LbdBad, and principles give place to the des.e f a. r offic^ and xt
fruits. This was the British situation for the larger part of the eight-
Sk century. After 1714 any one with serious political ambxbons
had to call hiself a Whig; the Tories shrank to a group that merely
decried whatever the government did, and the major opposrtion
was among the Whigs who were out of office and wanted to be in
Intrigue did service for principle; parties remained amorphous and
the constitution with them. It did not begin to set in the modern
mold until the issues of a later age again split the pohbcal world

in two.

So much for the oligarchs and the system by which they gov-
erned. They were a worldly lot, whose private morals were little
better than their public, and to our eye their sophistication seems
tinged with grossness. The crudity revealed by Hogaxth underlay
the graces that Chesterfield extolled, and Marriage a la Mode was
the social counterpart of the rotten borough. But these rulers of
Britain gross or graceful, were animated by tremendous energy. It
was their salient characteristic. They drove forward with the same
unresting determination as the Puritans before them, though toward
wholly different goals. Instead of revolutionizing their country at
home they revolutionized its position abroad.

Their revolution was a response to forces long at work in British
history. Political isolation from Europe, imposed in the fifteenth cen-
tury by England's defeat in France, had combined in the sixteenth
century with the religious isolation of a church divorced from the
Contmeni; and this remoteness had soon been accentuated by the
onset of the Puritan Revolution. The counteracting force of com-
mercial and colonial expansion had made little impression on the
surface of events. Under the surface it had generated greater and
greater pressure, which had appeared in the statecraft of Cromwell

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center at Delhi outward, just when the East India Company and its
French rival were struggling for markets; the two companies were
drawn into native politics, and the tension between them mounted.
In the West Indies the rise of the lucrative sugar industry was in-
creasing the profits in imperialism, and with them the endemic hos-
tility between the Bourbon states and Britain. In Spanish America,
above all the Utrecht settlement was being strained to the breaking
point. The new dynasty in Madrid was tightening its control of trade
bv reforming the customs service, and British merchants, accustomed
to smuggling behind the screen of the Asiento, felt that Spanish law-
enforcement was an intolerable grievance. Spanish exports were
wholly inadequate to meet the colonial demand, furthermore, and
France was acquiring the bulk of the market. Now that the family
partnership arranged at Utrecht was yielding cash returns, Britain
was growing restive.

By the 1730's the political as well as the commercial aspect of
the Utrecht settlement was in danger. The marital good luck of
the Hapsburgs, proverbial since the fifteenth century, ran out in the
eighteenth: the Spanish branch had already withered with a child-
less king, and a similar fate hung over the Austrian branch. The
Emperor Charles VI had only a daughter, Maria Theresa, and her
right to inherit the family domains was doubtful. Doubt was an op-
portunity for the rapacious powers of Europe; Austria was no more
able to settle her own affairs than Spain had been before her. The
new, militaristic kingdom of Prussia coveted Silesia, the Hapsburg
province on the upper Oder, and France still hungered for the Aus-
trian Netherlands. Another war of partition was impending, in which
the Hapsburg state might be extinguished.

Charles worked hard to avoid the danger. He had a touching
faith in the sanctity of a scrap of paper, and he peddled around the
courts of Europe a treaty that bound each signatory to respect his
daughter's inheritance. Most of the major powers signed, usually
for a consideration, but Great Britain alone had a keen interest in
maintaining the agreement. Although Silesia meant nothing to her,
the Netherlands meant much, and the dismemberment of Austria
would upset the Utrecht balance to the advantage of France. The
worries of Vienna were shared in London.

What ended Walpole's peace, however, was not the Austrian
problem but the activities of Spanish customs officers off the South

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then, with reasonable luck, be left with gains in the Austrian Nether-
lands.

The British began with no coherent strategy and many blunders.
As early as 1754 the efforts of the French to strengthen their posi-
tion in the Ohio Valley had touched off fighting in America, and in
the next year Braddock had been defeated and killed in the attempt
to capture Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh). Nominal peace continued
in Europe, but in the spring of 1756 France struck a staggering
blow by seizing Minorca almost under the eyes of a British relieving
squadron. Three months later Frederick attacked, to anticipate his
enemies, and the Seven Years' War began. For a year British set-
backs continued. In America the French advanced toward Albany;
in India Calcutta was lost; in Europe Frederick was defeated by
the Austrians, a Hanoverian army under a son of George II capitu-
lated at Klosterzeven, and the Electorate was overrun by the French.
Britain again, after more than a century, seemed to be "declining to
contempt beneath the meanest."

The anger of the nation projected an outsider into power. Wil-
liam Pitt was the leading critic of government; the King and his
chief minister, the borough-mongexing Duke of Newcastle, strove to
keep him out of office. But Pitt knew that he alone could save the
country, and he knew that the country knew it. Pressure outside
Parliament mounted until the King and the Duke although they
still controlled a majority of the commons were forced to capitu-
late, Pitt took over direction of the war, and Newcastle was de-
moted to his political manager. The eighteenth century provides no
more striking example of the influence of public opinion upon an
oligarchic legislature the power of **the majority without doors,"
in Bolingbroke's phrase, to force "the majority within doors to
truckle to the minority."

Pitt was a far cry from the Whig magnates. He was incorruptible,
and in an age of rationalism he appealed to the emotions and imag-
ination. The amazing ascendancy he acquired over the House of
Commons was due less to his hold on the public or to his eloquence
although he was one of the great orators in the history of Parlia-
mentthan to his sheer moral stature. He dwarfed the oligarchs
and their henchmen, and they trooped after him. He had the flint of
true leadership, which kindled a fire of enthusiasm even in party
hacks. His arrogance and nervous instability made "him a difficult

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tegic realities of her position. The British anny was not large .enough
to plav a dominant role in a war in Europe. It could not be made
arge Lugh, if only because of the rooted British opposition to: onl-
itaSsm. But a few thousand men who would be brushed aside by
AeTench in Germany might be supremely effective against them
on the St. Lawrence, provided that a Continental war prevented
France from sending more than a fraction of her force -verseas. H
her fleets were blockaded in European waters by ^ B^ Nav *
the stream of men and supplies to her colonies would be further re-
stricted and the colonists starved of the means for .defense. The
British purpose was first to subsidize a land ally or allies to distract
France on the Continent, then to strangle her overseas communica-
tions by a blockade in home waters, then to conquer her colonies
with British troops. This was the most effective use of British power,
and effectiveness is the criterion of strategy. In this way Pitt fought
Louis XV and his son fought Napoleon, until Great Britain had ap-
propriated the bulk of the French empire.

Victories began before Pitt had been a year in office. In 1758 Fort
Duquesne and Louisburg were captured, while Frederick held his
own in the Germanies. The fall of Quebec in 1759 was soon fol-
lowed by the surrender of all French forces in Canada. British naval
supremacy in the Indian Ocean, implemented by successes on land,
ended the French dream of an empire in India. An attempted inva-
sion of the British Isles was stopped by a series of well-timed blows,
climaxed by Hawke's brilliant chase of the enemy through the storm-
wrack of Quiberon Bay; thereafter the remnants of the French fleet
were swept from the seas. The tide of success flooded in, and by the
end of 1760 Britain had to all intents won her war.

But Frederick was far from winning his. He stood at bay against
appalling odds, striking at one enemy after the other until his army
was reduced to a rabble and he was carrying a vial of poison like
the Nazi leaders in 1945. If he had drunk it, the future of Europe
might have been happier. But he held on, and Great Britain was
pledged to support *" - Pitt insisted on abiding by the pledge,
partly from a sense of honor and partly from a determination that
this time the old duel with France should be settled once and for
all. His aim was not a negotiated peace on the Utrecht model,
which would respect the niceties of the balance of power, but a set-
tlement that would clear the French forever from the path of British

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rights off Newfoundland that were valued at a mffiion pounds a
year the most lucrative part of her North American venture, and
L regained her position in the West Indies In the eyes of her mer-
cantilL the bargain was far better than they had had reason to

to French patriots the peace was a bitter blow. TTieir empire
was virtually at an end, their finances and navy were in ruins; the
proudest monarchy of Europe had been humbled by an oligarchy
of landlords and merchants. The effect on Frenchmen was twofold:
on the one hand, hatred of Britain and a longing for revenge; on
the other, a desire to emulate the methods of a country that could
harness its resources with such spectacular success. Britain became
a subject of serious study. She was the focus of admiration for An-
glophile liberals, and at the same time of cold scrutiny by the Anglo-
phobes in power.

One aspect of Britain's strength was obvious. She had succeeded,
to a degree unexampled since the days of Cromwell, by the use of
sea power. France had lost her colonies because she had been un-
able to get at them through the British blockade; if she were ever
to re-establish her empire, and with it the popularity of the Bourbon
regime, she had to rebuild her fleet in preparation for the day of
revenge. That day might not be distant. Her failure in the war had
the one compensation that it left her with no embittered enemies on
the Continent, whereas Britain had nothing but enemies - Prussia
hopelessly alienated, Austria soured by the British defection, the
minor maritime states antagonized by the high-handedness of the
recent blockade, relations with Russia frigid, Spain dreaming of re-
venge as fondly as France. Britain for once stood alone, the single
and isolated victor.

Isolation was not the only danger in victory. The ousting of the
French from Canada removed one of the strongest ties holding the
British colonies to the mother country. Colonial independence had
been a thorn in the side of administrators since the days of the Res-
toration, but it had been mitigated by colonial fear of its conse-
quences. As long as the French were near at hand, threatening the
whole Atlantic seaboard, the redcoats and ships of the line were re-
luctantly welcomed. Once the French withdrew as Pitt's oppo-
nents had argued as early as 1761 the stimulus to loyalty was

Star of Empire

miliar. This sense the leaders of the nation lacked. They had com-
mon sense where they needed insight, and dogged tenacity where
they needed foresight Their qualities were not a match for the rev-
olutions of the coming decades, which repeatedly threw them onto
the defensive and eventually shattered their power.

The first of those revolutions was already preparing. The financial
crisis at home, coinciding with the departure of the French from
Canada, ensured trouble in the colonies just when Britain's triumph
had left her friendless in Europe. As if this crisis were not enough,
the domestic power of the oligarchs was simultaneously attacked
from a new and unexpected quarter, the throne, and the comfortable
house of Whiggism was divided against itself. When the struggle
came it was on three fronts, colonial, European, and domestic.
From it the ruling class emerged, with its power battered but in-
tact, to confront more devastating struggles. The Peace of Paris, in
retrospect, was the apogee of that class and of the empire it built,
and also the beginning of the end for both.

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would thereby be eliminated, and he would at last be free to rise to

his true stature. _ xxru- -u c

This was the rationalist's solution to an old question, Which of
vou by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" Anyone
can was the answer, because thought is the way to perfection. Such
Utopian optimism was in itself an intellectual revolution. It was
squarely at odds with Christian orthodoxy, which had hitherto been
the frame of Western culture. The philosophers of the enlighten-
ment did not oppose the Church merely because it was privileged,
wealthy, and obscurantist; their point of view was antithetical to
that of any theology, Protestant or Catholic. They believed in the
capacity of man to lift himself by his own intellectual bootstraps;
the Church taught his sinful incapacity. They believed in natural,
changeless laws binding creation in an inviolable web of order; tiie
Church taught that the web had been torn at a specific moment, in
the reign of Caesar Augustus, by the transcendant miracle of God
made man. The two attitudes have not to this day been fully
reconciled.

The Protestant Reformation had inaugurated the revolt against
traditional authority. But its reformers would have turned in loath-
ing from a rebel against divine authority. Their purpose had been
to re-emphasize God's immediate relationship to the individual be-
liever. They had loosed a spirit of inquiry, however, which through
the years had gradually fused with the worldliness of the Renais-
sance spirit, of the capitalist and scientist, to produce a challenging
of God's omnipotence. This challenge was a turning point in Euro-
pean civilization. For more than a thousand years the belief in an
active and purposeful deity had been at the core of social thinking,
however perverted it may have been in social practice. Now the be-
lief and its derivative Christian ethic were assailed by a new creed
of man. The new, like the old, rested on faith. But it was faith in
reason, not God, and it promised a Utopia built with hands.

Rationalism was by its very nature more than an intellectual rev-
olution. Its goal was a millenniuni as tangible and materialistic as
that of communism today, and its followers expected to transform
not only ways of thought and belief but the fabric of society. The
political and class structure of the eighteenth-century state was a
patchwork of archaism, caprice, and illogic; if these absurdities
were deleted, the structure itself might collapse. The most obvious

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tional system was obvious, the British interests supporting it were
weak, and the financial incentive to change it was pressing. Reform
therefore attempted. It was based on an analyse ft* was the-
sound but that suffered-Hke so much analyse lope-

profit The colonies were not considered as mere objects of exploita-
L. but inevitably the emphasis was upon the profit of the mother
country. Because she furnished the preponderant economic and mil-
itary power and her prosperity enabled the colonies to prosper her
inZSs were central and theirs peripheral. The latter should if
necessary, be sacrificed to the former, and in consequence the colo-
nies could not and should not have a decisive part in determining
over-all economic policy. That was determined for them by the im-
perial Parliament at Westminster.

So much for theory. In practice the economic subordination of
the colonies was largely mitigated because the statutes designed to
enforce it -the so-called acts of trade -were laxly adnunistered.
Laxity, however shocking it might be to the theorist, was defensible
in dealing with the North American colonies; it had the effect of
giving them an economic freedom commensurate with their politi-
cal freedom. A government that ignores its own laws is not acting
rationally but may be acting wisely, and this subconscious wisdom
is an imponderable.

For a century and 'more the American colonies had been nurtured
on political liberty. During that time Great Britain had been dis-
tracted from them, first by her own revolutions and then by the duel
with France, and had thus practiced toward them an inadvertent
laissez faire alien to the mercantilist spirit. In this atmosphere the
old seeds of localism, transplanted to America, had thriven as the
green bay tree. The colonists had a large measure of political au-
tonomy sanctioned by law, and of economic autonomy sanctioned
by neglect of the law; one derived from their charters, the other
from a usage so old that it had acquired for them the legality of cus-
tom, The two were facets of the same thing, with which the old co-
lonial system was consonant, for all its fllogic, and the doctrinaire
logic of mercantilism was not. Economic subordination was no more
compatible with real self-government than it is today. The British
logicians of empire were gradually forced, in consequence, to the

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many grounds. The smuggling trade, particularly in molasses had
Become a vested interest, and the attempt at law-enforcement be-
came a grievance. The colonial oligarchies entrenched m the as-
semblies were as impatient of outside interference as the English
squires had been in the days of Charles I; they particularly resented
the idea that each royal governor would thenceforth be free from
dependence on his assembly for his salary and therefore for his con-
duct The other purpose of taxation, imperial defense, was a minor
matter to Americans now that the French had withdrawn from
Canada, and the government's concern with it seemed a pretext for
extortion. The excitement which these factors aroused was serious
enough, but worse was to come.

The financial issue, as often before in British history, raised a far
deeper constitutional problem. Many Americans refused to admit
that the taxing power rested with the imperial Parliament, and the
next step in their logic was to deny that there was an imperial Par-
liament. The king" as Benjamin Franklin put it, "and not the king,
lords, and commons collectively, is their sovereign" The Crown
governed through the local legislatures, in other words, and Parlia-
ment had no more jurisdiction outside the mother country than the
House of Burgesses had outside Virginia. The taxing power is in the
warp of sovereignty itself, and the colonists' dislike of being taxed
from Westminster produced a denial of parliamentary sovereignty.
The constitutional fat was now in the fire.

Legal equality between the British and colonial legislatures was
the logic of the future, from which eventually grew the present con-
cept of dominion status and the British Commonwealth of Nations.
But in the reign of George III such logic was premature. If the
British had accepted it they would have been precocious indeed,
and not necessarily wise. The decentralization that it implied might
well have had the result, at a time when dispatches took two
months to cross the Atlantic, of pulling the empire apart through
its own centrifugal forces. The argument also ran counter to the
British view of the constitution, according to which sovereignty was
not separable between Crown and Parliament but was vested in the
indivisible entity of Crown in Parliament, so that the king could not
govern in America independently of Parliament without governing
unconstitutionally. For all these reasons the American logic, impor-

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ha u, who** greed far domestic power had been

nL for aU his short stature, and a keen if limited mtelhgence;
above aH he was British to the core, and his energies were focused
on British affairs. TTiose energies were too great for a passave role
He had to assert himself, and an assertive monarch spelled trouble

f cSrge wS no absolutist. He was loyal to his idea of the constitu-
tion, which was that ministers should serve him in fact as well as
theory, by carrying out policies that he initiated. Once he found the
right men, he intended to secure them a majority in the House of
Commons through adroit manipulation, through borough-monger-
ing and the use of patronage, and to establish by these ignoble
means his concept of true monarchical government. When he gov-
erned through a subservient cabinet and parliament he hoped that
parties would sink into desuetude, and that the nation would shake
off its apathy and become united under the throne.

The time was ripe for the design. George was making no new
claims for the prerogative, but merely taking back into his own
hands the means of influence that his predecessors had tacitly dele-
gated to their ministers; the constitution was still amorphous.
George was not destroying the party system, which had disinte-
grated years before into sterile f actionalism; nor was he corrupting
Parliament, for the Whigs had already done that. The cabinet was
delicately balanced between king and commons, and the venality of
the Lower House reflected the general debasement of politics.
These conditions were the opportunity for an obstinate and skilful
Tn?n determined to beat the politicians at their own game.

The intrusion of this unexpected player put the Whigs in an awk-
ward position. They could not admit his interference without aban-
doning the concept of government that they had been working out
since 1714. Yet on legal grounds they could not combat his interfer-
ence; the tradition of cabinet autonomy had not yet acquired the
legality of long custom. In logic they had only one alternative to
giving way a reform drastic enough to remove the foundation of
royal influence. If advancement in the church, the military, and the

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Star of Empire

spirit and argument to the colonies, and while perhaps they meant
no more than the ruin of a minister, they in effect divided one half
of the empire from the other ?

The result was years of wobbling. Coercion gave place to concilia-
tion, conciliation to coercion again, as succeeding cabinets tried to
solve the enigma of how to balance the budget and retain office in
the face of recalcitrant Americans and critics at home. The ques-
tions at issue with the colonies might conceivably have been com-
promised if they had been handled over a period of time by a single
ministry endowed with firmness, foresight, and moderation. This
opportunity was lost in the struggle between an ambitious King and
an opposition that could not govern and would not let him govern.

In 1770 a measure of stability returned at last. Many Whigs, dis-
couraged by the ministerial chaos, preferred even royal influence to
paralysis, and these reluctant royalists joined the self-seekers to
form a group known as the King's Friends. At its head was a man
after George's heart. Lord North was a gifted parliamentarian and
courtier, an aristocrat to his fingertips, and as malleable by tempera-
ment as his master was rigid; he believed wholeheartedly in giving
the Crown, as he said, the powers that "it is acknowledged to pos-
sess by every sound Whig theory." His accession as prime minister
signalized the King's victory at home; the remaining task was to
bring the colonies into line. To this North turned in a conciliatory
spirit, but the time for conciliation was gone. Great Britain had
taken a position that the colonists defied, and from which no self-
respecting cabinet could withdraw.

The American Revolution, like its two predecessors in British his-
tory, resulted from changes initiated by the central government.
King George had far less personal responsibility for change than
James II or Charles I, but his prestige was as much involved in the
collection of North's duty on tea as Charles's had been in the collec-
tion of ship money. Involvement was the price of success. Once
George became chief executive in fact as well as name, his position
depended on the achievements or failures of his servants. By the
same token the colonists were forced to abandon their distinction
between Crown and Parliament, now that one controlled the other.
*TThey consider you as united with your servants against America,"
JuniTis warned the King, "and know how to distinguish the sover-

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made a final effort at concession, but by the time the news of it
reached America the Battle of Lexington had been fought.

This was the result of the attempt to rationalize the imperial sys-
tem The old system had been in many respects irrational, but it had
worked in a slipshod fashion. Within its framework the American
colonies had grown into the self-consciousness of adolescence, which
demanded - and in practice had received - a larger measure of in-
dependence than comported with the ties of empire. When Britain
attempted to tighten the ties, reasonably but unwisely, the colonies
pulled away. The imperial connection was stretched to the breaking
point, and the only remaining question was whether force could
preserve it where reason had failed.

Ill Civil War in the Empire

THE COMPLEX imperial ties economic interdependence, senti-
ment, military power determined the nature of the ensuing strug-
gle. Colonial economy was intimately associated with the British
market, and the war upset mercantile interests on both sides of the
Atlantic. The tie of sentiment was stronger: in Britain it convinced
many men that armed suppression of the colonists was the most ig-
noble form of civil war, and sapped the will for drastic military
measures; in America it created the loyalists, ardent or passive, who
were the constant hope and the recurrent disappointment of the
British high command for the next six years. Economic and emo-
tional factors made for disunity in both camps and left the brunt of
the effort, as in the Puritan Revolution, to be borne by determined
minorities.

The military factor seemed to guarantee that the colonies would
be speedily brought to heeL They had grown under the protection
of British fleets and armies, and initially had little force of their
own. They could improvise an army, but not a navy; the lack of sea
power should alone have been fatal to the American cause. From
beginning to end the war depended on the sea. If Britain had ex-
ploited her control of American waters during the three years that
she retained it, she might have choked off the rebellion at the ports.
Instead she frittered away her opportunity until France intervened
and changed the whole character of the struggle. In those first three
years Britain's military policy prepared her defeat.

Star of Empire

success would only add the burden of a subsequent military occupa-
tion. Thus winning the war in the field might destroy the King's ex-
periment by way of the budget For the first two years, while the
Bourbon threat still seemed remote, this solution was rejected for

another.

The method attempted was a war of blockade. Its purpose was to
protect British trade and choice off American until the rebels were
forced to a satisfactory settlement. The prime instrument was the
fleet, based on the enemy coast first at Boston, then at New York.
Naval pressure was gradual, cumulative, and - for the majority of
the people affected - inconspicuous; it could therefore lend weight
to negotiations, where invasion would only have embittered the
struggle. Blockade was also safer than large-scale land operations.
The Americans were powerless to get at the ships, and the support-
ing troops were almost equally secure; they could move faster by
sea than their opponents by land. This form of warfare appealed to
the ministers, It risked no disasters great enough to unseat them,
and laid a relatively light burden on the taxpayer. It was aimed at
forcing negotiations, and a negotiated peace was the only solution,
short of British withdrawal, that could be lasting.

Blockade, however, is slow in its effects, and the British aggra-
vated this drawback by half measures. At the end of two years they
had failed to strangle American commerce; the rebellion was so
strong that France was preparing to gamble on it. They had squan-
dered the most precious of military commodities, time, and needed a
quick decision at whatever risk. They therefore tried a quite differ-
ent strategy, designed to force a settlement by land operations. Their
aim was to seize a single key area, the line of the Hudson, in order
to cut off New England from the central colonies and so end the
war. Their logical method would have been twin offensives, one
southward from Canada and one up river from New York, to con-
verge like pincers on Albany. But they threw logic to the winds for
the sake of extending the naval blockade. While Burgoyne launched
the northern attack, the main army at New York sailed off to cap-
ture Philadelphia, and thereby sacrificed that command of the Hud-
son without which Burgoyne was doomed. His contact with Canada
had broken behind him before he reached the river, and he could
not establish contact with New York. His surrender at Saratoga em-
phasized the complete dependence of inland operations on logistics.

Star of Empire

European blockade, the French were able to attack overseas when-
ever and wherever they chose. Once the British knew a French
squadron had sailed, the most they could do was dispatch what they
hoped was equivalent force to what they hoped was the point of at-
tack. If their hopes were borne out and their force arrived in time,
they were safe. But their supine defensive depended on the luck of
good intelligence, fast sailing, and competent commanders in the
danger spots. Sooner or later their luck would run out.

It served them remarkably well for more than three years. Spain
entered the war in 1779 and the Netherlands at the end of 1780,
while the Baltic states formed an armed neutrality to curtail Brit-
ain's highhandedness toward their trade with her enemies. If the al-
lies had used their strength effectively, the verdict of 1763 would
have been modified or even reversed. But they lacked unity and acu-
men. The Dutch played a negligible part; the Spaniards captured
Minorca and engaged in a fruitless three-year siege of Gibraltar,
which immobilized their navy in home waters. The brunt of the
overseas war consequently fell to France.

The enemy offensive, fortunately for Britain, was as supine as her
own defensive. The French had sedulously strengthened their navy
since 1763, but they used it with wasteful caution. Instead of con-
centrating it against a single British position, they squandered it in
a series of minor attacks from Ceylon to Bhode Island. It failed to
gain the upper hand in any theater except one, North America,
where victory was the least profitable to France. There the British
blundered irretrievably, and the French and Americans made the
blunder final. The independence of the United States and the col-
lapse of King George's experiment at home were assured simultane-
ously in Virginia.

In the spring of 1780 the British prepared the way by opening an
offensive in the Carolinas while they still held New York. They
thereby divided their force in two parts when they could not be
sure of controlling the water route between the two. The southern-
field commander, Lord Cornwallis, then defied logistics by breaking
contact with his base at Charleston, and fighting his way by a cir-
cuitous route northward to Virginia. He reckoned without his hosts.
The Franco-American army marched suddenly from the Hudson
to the Chesapeake, while the main French battle fleet sailed from
the West Indies; only a part of the British West-Indian fleet f ol-

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Britain had lost heavily in prestige and power, but her traditional
enemies had gained nothing commensurate. Of all the belligerents,
in fact, the only one that achieved its objectives was the infant
United States.

The treaty left that infant in a remarkable situation. The verdict
of 1763 was reaffirmed as it related to France and Spain: neither re-
turned to North America in strength. Spain, it is true, held Florida
and the vast wilderness of Louisiana, but she did so essentially on
sufferance; the sea lanes to her colonies were commanded by the
Royal Navy. The United States was even more negligible as a power,
for her tiny fleet was abolished and her regular army reduced to
eighty men. The only effective force in North America was British.
Britain, as will soon be seen, was learning a new circumspection
in the use of force, and her urge for territorial aggrandizement was
giving place to the lure of industrial and commercial expansion. She
was committed to holding Canada and maintaining naval control of
the Atlantic, but no British cabinet seriously planned to reconquer
the United States or even to encircle it, as the French had encir-
cled the thirteen colonies. If the republic could accommodate itself
to British sea power and resist the temptation to annex Canada, it
had the possibility of expansion to the Caribbean and eventually to
the Pacific. France and Spain could not bar its way; it was insulated
from Europe by the British fleet. For a century the United States
was free to grow into a great power without ever possessing, except
in her civil war, the army or navy by which every other great power
was known. Thus the civilian tradition in British society, developed
because of insularity, continued to develop in American society be-
cause of insulation-
Great Britain did not provide the insulation from kindness. She
acted from necessity and policy necessity, in that she had to retain
control of the western Atlantic for the defense of Canada; policy, in
that her distrust of France and Spain predisposed her to favor what-
ever would curtail their influence in the New World. At bottom her
interests complemented those of the United States. Although the
tradition of antagonism between the two, derived from the revolu-
tion, embittered relations and contributed to periodic crises for an-
other century, it was rooted in emotion more than reason. War was
often threatened but materialized only once, and then as much by
luck as by design. A basic community of interests, recognized only

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intolerance of Dublin, which had done so much to perpetuate the
curse of Cromwell, was being touched by a new spirit. Grattan was
seeking to transform a narrow and corrupt legislature into the sym-
bol not of the Anglican or even the Protestant interest, but of Ire-
land.

This dawning nationalism needed force to be effective, and Brit-
ain was compelled to provide it with force. The war with France
and Spain raised the old danger of invasion at a moment when the
regular army was almost entirely deployed overseas, and the North
administration reluctantly allowed the enlistment and arming of an
Irish militia. These volunteers put teeth in Grattan's program, and
he won two major concessions from Britain. In 1780 the Irish ac-
quired virtual trade equality at home and throughout the empire; in
1782 their Parliament was emancipated from control by the Irish
and English privy councils and raised to a position of legal equality
with the Westminster Parliament This step, taken in time of crisis,
was a striking contrast to the coming together of England and Scot-
Land in a similar crisis years before. Britain and Ireland moved
apart; their legal bond became merely a common sovereign of lim-
ited powers. On the surface the settlement presaged the modern
concept of dominion status.

Under the surface, however, it meant far less. Patronage was still
controlled by the Crown, which therefore had the same sort of in-
fluence in Dublin as in Westminster. The Irish Parliament, further-
more, still represented oligarchs who, despite moments of national-
ist fervor, had no roots in the nation at large and did not speak for
it. They could not be expected to reform themselves by adopting
the whole of Grattan*s program, for they would never willingly ab-
dicate their power. The emancipation of the Catholic majority, and
even of the Ulster Presbyterians, seemed as remote as ever, and
without emancipation independence was illusory.

The final weakness in the settlement was that the concessions
made by Britain, voluntary as they appeared, had been won by the
threat of force. All Grattan's oratory could not conceal this fact,
which was part of the tragic pattern of Anglo-Irish relations. The
British knew that when their difficulties were serious the Irish would
add to them, as in 1598, in 1641, in 1690; the Irish knew that they
could wrest concessions from Britain only by force when she was
weak.

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rectors were required to keep the cabinet informed of their political
moves, and administrative changes were imposed on them: a gov-
ernor-general was created, with authority over the three Company
centres in Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and four men were named
to his council and given power to veto his policies. The act was well
meant but badly drawn. The complexity of Indian affairs was not
yet clearly understood in London, and supervision by an ill-in-
formed government could scarcely transmute the Company's profit
motive into a sense of imperial responsibility.

The next eleven years were the crisis of British power in India.
Just when the mother country was for the first time facing a hostile
Europe, her position in India was threatened by the first great na-
tive coalition. Her agents had been sowing the wind by a decade of
reckless exploitation and interference, and the seeds grew into a
whirlwind as soon as French intriguers promised a fleet and army.
The princes of central India, whose disunity had hitherto made pos-
sible the Company's position, combined to drive the British into the

sea.

If the Company's power was inadequate to meet this threat, tie
governor-general was superbly adequate. Warren Hastings was as
great a proconsul as Britain ever produced. For years he fought a
tenacious and daring defensive until he succeeded in splitting the
coalition, just before the French arrived to cement it, and in 1784
peace was restored. On the surface the British had neither gained
nor lost, but the foundation of their influence had been enormously
strengthened. Hastings had won them prestige, that subtle virtue
that was more persuasive than armies in the power politics of India.

The close of the war coincided with the passage by Parliament of
a new regulating act, which established the main framework of ad-
ministration for three-quarters of a century. An official board of
control, working through the directors, assumed final authority, and
the center of Indian government was thus transferred from India
House to Whitehall. At the same time the act precluded treaty rela-
tions with the native princes, and so continued for a short time the
Company's antiquated principle of staying out of politics. The re-
sponsibility of power could not be avoided for long by a statute, and
the principle did not outlast the century.

Hastings returned home in 1785. Three years later he was im-
peached. The most prominent liberals in Parliament Burke, Fox,

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subject races. The idea had vast potentialities for the future because
jt was a blend of reason and emotion. Reason suggested that back-
ward peoples like the Indians could enjoy their laws, rights, and
liberties only within a framework of order provided by Britain; emo-
tion added an intoxicating sense that the creation of order was Brit-
ain's duty toward the backward. The result, over the years to come,
was the distilling of nationalism into an imperialist faith, for which
Kipling provided the creed a century after Hastings'* acquittal.

Take up the White Man's burden

And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard
The cry of hosts ye humor

(Ah slowly!) toward the light:
*Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?' 2

In the decade following the Peace of Versailles the leaven of
change was working as much at home as in the empire. New politi-
cal and economic forces were undermining the foundation of the
oligarchy. Their obvious effects were postponed for half a century
and more, largely by Britain's involvement in her struggle with the
French Revolution, but under the surface the forces were continu-
ously at work to mold the Victorian future.

In politics, the collapse of King George's experiment paved the
way for a modern cabinet. George fought tenaciously to keep his
power, but he was no longer a match for the opposition. Conserva-
tive Whigs had lost their veneration for him, and they joined hands
with the reformers to abolish his most flagrant means of controlling
the House of Commons. He was so disgusted with his former friends
that he then turned to "the boy" of British politics; in December of
1783 William Pitt, Chatham's younger son, assumed the premiership
at the age of twenty-four. He held that office, with one brief inter-
mission, until his death in 1806. During those years the British po-
litical system began to assume a recognizably modern form.

George, even though his influence was curtailed, had no intention
of retiring to a constitutional niche. At the outset Pitt lacked both

* Rudyard Kipling: "The Wliite Man's Burden" from The Five Nations.
Copyright 1903, 1931 by Rudyard Kipling, reprinted by permission of Mrs.
George Bambridge and Doubleday & Company, Inc.

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eventually monopolized the name of Whigs, while the conservatives
reverted to the name of Tories. Thus the two parties of the Stuart
era generated by the conflicts over Crown and Church, were regen-
erated at the moment when both Crown and Church had ceased to
be political issues.

This renascence of party was as important for the future of British
government as the decline in royal influence, and as gradual. Signs
of it appeared in the 1780*8, but the subsequent war gave such an
overwhelming impetus to conservatism that for years the liberals
were an impotent minority. The forces of change, however, were
working for them. By the time the oligarchy had weathered the war,
it was a house divided against itself; behind the imposing eight-
eenth-century fa$ade the structure was splitting apart. In 1815 the
Tories were still in power, but their days were numbered. The vic-
tory they achieved over revolution abroad was the beginning of
their end.

V Economic Revolution

THE UNITY of the oligarchs could scarcely have been shattered by
political forces alone. If they had retained that monopoly of wealth
from which their political power had derived, few of them could
have been argued into improving the governmental machinery, let
alone into sharing control of it with outsiders. But by the close of
the century the foundation o their wealth was beginning to crack
Some of them were falling on hard times; others, richer than before,
were making their money in new ways. Outsiders were rising to for-
tune almost overnight and clamoring for their share of power. They
clamored in vain. The parliamentary system, elastic as it was, could
not accommodate the rush of newcomers, and consequently ceased
to represent the entire wealth of the country. Oligarchy was no
longer synonymous with plutocracy, and excluded plutocrats turned
to reform as their battering-ram against the locked doors of Parlia-
ment. The Whigs inside eventually became their champions, as they
had championed dissent more than a century before, and out of this
affiance a new Whiggism was born.

The revival of the two-party system, in summary, was to a large
degree the result of economic change. But the result was dwarfed by
the cause. Britain was undergoing an economic revolution that
transformed agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, social relations,

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capital and manpower, large-scale manufacture would have been
impossible; without a surplus of food, the great industrial centers
would have starved.

The other chief prerequisite, a demand for English manufactures,
had been operative ever since English woolens had become a Euro-
pean staple. But the eighteenth-century wool trade was too inelastic
to take full advantage of its opportunities. It had grown under the
protection and surveillance of the state, and the price of privilege
was conservatism; the trade was slow to gamble on new techniques
or conquer new markets even when it began to face serious compe-
tition at home. The competitor was cotton. The spectacular rise of
cotton manufacturing, which had its ramifications throughout Brit-
ish economy, was both an example and a major cause of the Indus-
trial Revolution.

The British public had acquired a taste for cotton fabrics from the
imports of the East India Company. By the early eighteenth century
the vogue of "calicoes" (from the Indian port of Calicut) gave birth
to a domestic industry, which sprouted despite opposition from the
Company and then from the wool interests. Cotton was an urchin
among British manufactures - underprivileged, tough, combative,
and ingenious in surmounting handicaps. The great head start of the
wool trade could be offset only by the most enterprising men exper-
imenting with the newest techniques and implements to give them
an edge over their competitors. These men were lone wolves. Their
struggles with each other and with the wool magnates brought into
being the factory system.

The great obstacle to increasing and cheapening production was
lack of equipment. The primitive tools with which the cotton trade
had begun were a challenge to reason in a rationalistic age, and the
needs and ambitions of the factory-owners gave the inventors their
market; if necessity was the mother of invention, profit was the fa-
ther. Each improvement led to further improvements because the
acceleration of one stage in the manufacturing process created the
incentive to accelerate, and therefore to mechanize, another. The
flying shuttle increased the speed of weaving, for example, to the
point where hand-spinning no longer provided sufficient thread, and
the result was the spinning jenny and the mule. These machines
soon produced thread faster than it could be used, until weaving was
speeded again by the introduction of the power loom. Manufacture

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shrewdest capitalists gambled upon an unpredictable future and
progressed by a somersault of expansion and retrenchment, during
which they took on and laid off hands in bewildering succession.
The average hand could not survive for long without work. He had
been forced from subsistence farming on the manor into subsistence
on wages alone, and he was almost defenseless against unemploy-
ment, whether caused by the business cycle or by his own infirm-
ity. In rural England a paternalistic gentry might mitigate his exist-
ence, but in a new mill town it was likely to be poor, nasty, brutish,
and short. If the null did not lay him off, working conditions
soon incapacitated him through sickness or premature old age. Em-
ployers had little time for compassion on themselves or their labor-
ers, and they begrudged any diversion of capital from business to
poor relief. The machinery of relief, scarcely changed since the days
of Elizabeth, began to break down under the load of pauperism.
The result was appalling misery.

Another problem, more immediately disturbing to the oligarchs
than the new poverty, was a new form of wealth. The pacemakers
of progress were young industries that had grown too fast for the
trammels of governmental control, and the men who made their
mark were a new breed of capitalist. They were for the most part
social parvenus who had forced their way up from the lower classes
by a blend of daring, acumen, and ruthlessness, the qualities re-
quired for survival in a world of cut-throat competition. Success
gave them a contempt for the relatively staid and tidy world of the
older manufactures, and for the system of state supervision by
which that world was bounded. They clamored for economic free-
dom. in other words for laissez f aire.

The time was ripe for this doctrine. Governmental surveillance
had been gradually losing its vitality ever since businessmen had
turned against the interference of Charles I. As the Stuart concept
of paternalism in the national interest had given place to the oli-
garchic interests of the Whigs, Parliament had shown an increasing
tendency to keep its hands off business, until by the late eighteenth
century a large measure of free enterprise was sanctioned by prac-
tice. But the new industrialists wanted more than that. They hoped
not only to free the manufacturing process from the last remnants
of state regulation, but to destroy the elaborate mercantilist system
that restricted the marketing of their goods. They particularly op-

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willing to move with the times but unwilling to be jostled by them,
and for all his liberal measures Pitt was not at heart a reformer; his
respect for the past was too great and his political vision too lim-
ited. The Whigs were therefore becoming the champions of change,
and they had behind them the mounting force of the industrialists-
unrest; it might have seemed to an acute observer at the end of the
1780 s that they would soon begin to refashion the structure of the
country. Appearances were deceptive. Instead of Whig enlighten-
ment, Tory conservatism remained entrenched for another forty
years.

VI War against the French Revolution

THE REASON lay not in Great Britain but on the Continent. From
1789 until 1815 no European country followed a normal process of
growth; all were twisted to a greater or less degree by the vast ex-
plosion that radiated from Paris. Great Britain was less directly af-
fected than Austria, Prussia, or Spain because she was cushioned by
water: the Channel assumed an importance it had not had since
1588 and was not to have again until 1940. But nothing could save
her entirely from the concussion, and it warped her natural develop-
ment. While she increased enormously in economic and military
power, she paid a price in social maladjustment and political atro-
phy. This lopsidedness ensured her survival but necessitated dras-
tic changes in the post-war era.

The opening of the French Revolution aroused few misgivings in
England. Patriots congratulated themselves on the apparent disrup-
tion of Britain's great enemy, and few were f arsighted enough to see
that the ancien regime had become a strait-jacket on the inherent
power of France. Reformers were enormously stimulated by the
ideas of the revolution in its early and moderate years, and even con-
servatives felt, with approving condescension, that the French were
at last achieving the advantages so long enjoyed by Englishmen.
These views were superficial and therefore transient, for French rad-
icalism was more fundamental than most of its British observers
realized.

On its philosophical side the French Revolution was as much a
product of applied reason as the revolt of the American colonies or
the transformation of Lancashire. French intellectuals had demon-
strated the illogic of the Bourbon regime and worked out formulae

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aware that atrophy means death; w a state without the means of some
change is without the means of its conservation." But he also in-
sisted that the reformer must understand the reason behind an
abuse before trying to remedy it; the underlying principle may be
sound, and the abuse merely a perversion. The radical would sweep
away the present mixture of good and bad on the chance that the
future will be better. Burke would retain the good in the mixture
and gradually and cautiously amend the bad. Guidance in reform-
ing, he contended, is given by the experience of the past, which
sets on human institutions the seal of prescriptive value.

This was an intensely national brand of conservatism. Against the
universality of French ideas, with their appeal to immediate de-
struction, Burke set the ideal of slow change and invested it with
a majesty of its own; against the abstract rights of man of all men
everywhere he set the particular liberties of Englishmen. His ar-
gument grew from the soil of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights,
from the long tradition of remedying specific grievances in specific
ways to accord with the needs of the moment rather than with rea-
son's eternal ultimates. It was this indigenous quality in the Reflec-
tions that made the book welcome to the oligarchy. The French
were preaching worldwide truths in the name of mankind; Burke
met them with British truths in the name of John Bull.

He was answered by a number of Francophiles, Tom Paine
among them, but the reading public was as much antagonized by
their doctrinaire radicalism as it was stirred by Burke's defense of
prescriptive values. The common people followed the lead of their
betters, and turned with undiscriminating exuberance against the
proponents of either revolution or reform. This fact is far more phe-
nomenal than the success of the Reflections. From 1790 to 1815 Brit-
ish society was in labor, giving birth to a new proletariat and a new
plutocracy, and the former was the sickly twin. Pauperism and mis-
ery were rampant among the workers at just the time when the oli-
garchies of the Continent were dissolving in a ferment of revolu-
tion. Why did the ferment not spread across the Channel? Part of
the answer lies in the great war, which reinforced the conservatism
of the British lower classes with a patriotic hatred of Frenchmen
and French ideas. Another and more significant part lies in a spir-
itual revival that affected the whole character of the proletariat.

More than half a century before, during the prosaic tranquillity

Star of Empire

peace. John Wesley, who had begun as a high churchman, was grad-
ually and reluctantly driven to deny apostolic succession and ordain
his preachers himself. This was open schism; by the end of the cen-
tury the Methodists were largely outside the fold, but they had gen-
erated a force that transformed the parent church. Their enthusiasm
had touched large numbers of the parochial clergy, from whom the
so-called evangelical movement spread outward and upward even
to the bench of bishops. The effect was to shift the Anglican empha-
sis from morals to salvation, to set in motion good works ranging
from Sunday schools to the abolition of slavery, and to increase the
influence of the establishment among the unenfranchised middle
class and even though to a far lesser degree than Methodism
among the mass of the people. Simultaneously the dissenting sects
were waked out of their torpor by the bustle of faith around them,
and the nonconformist conscience began to stir.

This revival, like other developments of the period, was already
determining the character of Victorian Britain. But the immediate
effect was to give the nation the spirit it needed to survive the next
quarter-century. From the realist's viewpoint evangelicalism was a
priceless social asset: it distracted the masses from their miseries in
fhfs world by intoxicating them with the world to come, it turned a
vast amount of reforming zeal from politics to revival meetings, and
it mitigated discontent both by stimulating philanthropy and by
emphasizing the brotherhood of all believers. The new faith, though
egalitarian, was less revolutionary in its social implications than the
duchess feared; for the moment its crude but forceful Protestantism
was turned against the Jacobins as Antichrist. While Burke justified
the church to tie literate as inherited wisdom and religion as the
moral core of society, the evangelicals woke in the illiterate a deep
religious emotion. These ingredients of philosophy and faith were
fused, in the heat of the nation's struggle for survival, into a cause
that had the force of crusade.

At the outset the ruling class had little sense of this cause. Pitt
himself, like most of the oligarchs, was by nature neither a friend of
revolution nor a reactionary; he was a free-thinker, absorbed with
the manipulation of power rather than with constitutional principles
or the dash of faiths. He was too sensible to fear an insurrection at
home and too much a product of the old order to appreciate, as
Burke did, the portent of events abroad. For the first three years of

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during his administration. The quality of the high command, civilian
and military, was little better in 1793 than it had been in 1775, but it
changed markedly under the strain of war; by the close of the cen-
tury Britain was well served at the admiralty and on the ocean, and
she began to bring her full strength to bear when nothing less could
have saved her.

At the beginning she frittered away her energies, largely because
the government understimated its task. Pitt went to war as a con-
servative and made the conventional moves. His aim was to contain
the revolution within reasonable bounds rather than to defeat it; he
hoped to finish the work in short order and return to the more con-
genial works of peace. The hope bred in him an almost invincible
belief that the French Republic, by its own unsound economy and
the pressure of a united Europe, would be brought to its knees with-
out great military effort. He therefore persisted in using financial
and strategic makeshifts.

His error was basic. By the end of 1793 the Jacobins had en-
trenched themselves in power, broken the dissident elements inside
France, identified the revolution with the nation, and decreed a
lev&e en masse. This first great experiment in conscription produced
the nation in arms mobs who went into battle with an enthusiasm
that more than compensated for their lack of discipline, and who
could ignore many of the tactical and even strategic limitations of
professional warfare. The men could be trusted out of sight of their
officers, as Prussians or Austrians could not, and could therefore at-
tack in open order, with the rush of a river in spate, and engulf an
enemy drilled in the machine-like maneuvers of the orthodox school;
they could also be trusted in hostile territory to forage for them-
selves without deserting, which gave their armies a mobility that
seemed to their opponents like black magic. Political revolution, in
short, was revolutionizing the art of war.

The results were soon apparent. By 1797 the wreckage of Pitt's
first coalition was scattered across the Continent. Prussia, Sardinia,
and Austria had been beaten into submission; France had annexed
Belgium and western Germany and turned Holland, northern Italy,
and Spain into vassal states. Britain stood alone against a power that
had already surpassed the dreams of Louis XIV. She stood solely by
virtue of her fleet, and even for it the prospects were dark. Her

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had no clear understanding, for all his genius, of how sea power can
contain land power. Bonaparte was about to begin his first adven-
ture with the Royal Navy.

The adventure showed his limitations. He realized that Britain
could not be invaded, but must be defeated to secure the French
position in Europe. He reasoned, as Hitler did in similar circum-
stances, that Britain's strength depended on her contacts with the
East and could best be attacked in the Nile Valley. The seizure of
Egypt would paralyze her trade with the Levant and perhaps open
the way for a French offensive against India. Bonaparte dreamed of
emulating Alexander, and the withdrawal of the Royal Navy from
the Mediterranean gave him his chance. In May 1798, accordingly,
he sailed from Toulon with a large fleet and army.

His plan rested on faulty assumptions. If Egypt was less impor-
tant to Britain than he supposed, his expedition might be unmo-
lested but would be no more than a grandiose sideshow. If, on the
other hand, Egypt was vital to Britain, he could never secure it: the
British could re-enter the Mediterranean at will, and his fleet was
in no state to secure the water-borne communications on which his
army depended. The French had revolutionized land warfare, but
their naval technique remained static. Their ships were qualitatively
inferior to the British, their quantitative advantage had been lost
off Cape St. Vincent, and their commanders were no match for the
new school of Jervis and Nelson. In these circumstances Bonaparte
was flirting with disaster.

His departure coincided with a change in Britain's policy. Her
prestige in southern Europe was perilously low; to restore it, the
government ordered a strong detachment into the Mediterranean.
This squadron, under the command of Nelson, found the French
fleet gone from Toulon, and after a long pursuit came up with it
moored in Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile. Despite approach-
ing darkness Nelson attacked. In the night he fought a battle of vir-
tual annihilation: out of thirteen enemy ships of the line, only two
escaped. When the sun rose, Bonaparte's army was cut off from
France. He himself escaped a year later, but his men remained un-
til they were captured in 1801. He had had his first lesson in sea
power, and Britain had struck the first blow in her counteroffensive.

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gious equality and parliamentary reform; soon its objective grew to
be an independent republic quit of borough-mongers and British,
and communications were opened with France. The movement
spread rapidly through the north, but at first it made little impres-
sion on the Catholic south, where the peasants were more interested
in their economic grievances than in the abstract ideal of independ-
ence. In the spring of 1797, however, an event occurred that turned
them into revolutionaries. The Dublin government, frightened by
the threat of republicanism in Britain's dark hour, ordered the peo-
ple of Ulster disarmed. Much of the work was entrusted to Prot-
estant volunteers, who interpreted disarmament as license to butcher
Catholics, and a great wave of refugees carried word of their doings
to the south. This was the fuse to the powder keg. Fortunately for
Britain it burned slowly, but by the spring of 1798 the explosion was
imminent. Economic ills, bigotry, and fear stirred the peasants to re-
volt, as much against their landlords and the Irish Protestants as
against the British. Once more, as at the time of the Boyne, France
was the expected deliverer. But the French were embarking for
Egypt.

The actual rebellion was a flash in the pan. The peasant mobs
were no match for the Ulster militia, let alone for the regulars who
were poured in from England, and the few troops sent by France
arrived when all was over. By midsummer Ireland was quiet under
a military government. But this was no solution, if only because the
British army was urgently needed elsewhere. A re-establishment of
tie old system was impossible; the Dublin oligarchs had misused it,
and Ireland could not be left to their vindictive ineptitude. Pitt
turned to the only feasible alternative, a political union of Ireland
with Great Britain.

He had the vision to see that the Irish Catholics, far from being
penalized for rebellion, would have to be represented by Catholics
in the new British Parliament. This was the cardinal virtue of his
plan. Under the existing system Catholic emancipation would be po-
litically reckless; it would jeopardize the British connection by de-
stroying the Protestant ascendancy. When combined with union,
however, it would be comparatively safe; Catholic votes that would
predominate in Dublin would be only a small minority in Westmin-
ster. The gift of emancipation, furthermore, -would go far toward

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tional disaster. Pitt felt that these dangers outweighed the value of
an equitable settlement in Ireland. He had committed himself to
the settlement, morally though not categorically, but he refused to
force the issue. He promised not to reopen it during the King's life-
time; then he resigned.

This overturn ruined the prospects of the union. The Irish had
abandoned their parliamentary emblem of statehood in return for
a promise that was not fulfilled. Instead they were governed by an
Anglican oligarchy In Westminster, even less responsive to their
needs than that in Dublin had been, and the franchise was as
meaningless to the Ulster Presbyterian as to the Galway Catholic;
it entitled both to choose from among their domestic enemies men
to misrepresent them in a foreign parliament. This, in the event, was
Pitt's settlement of the Irish problem. His enlightenment was de-
feated by the tradition of the Test Act and the Clarendon Code, per-
sonified in a stubborn and unbalanced old man who in his youth had
sworn an archaic coronation oath. After another generation the
Irish themselves forced Catholic emancipation, but by then the
time had passed when it could be the basis for true union.

VIII Victory at Sea

PITTS resignation coincided with the collapse of his second effort
to win the war. The Battle of the Nile had waked the hopes of the
European powers just "when continued French aggression had con-
firmed their fears. In 1799 Austria had resumed the fight, backed
now by Russia, and for the first time Russian armies had emerged
into western Europe; they had swept the French from Italy with
Austrian help, and then had abruptly disappeared again. Bonaparte
had returned from Egypt to make himself First Consul, and had
soon redeemed the defeats. Austria, isolated by Russia's defection,
was forced to another humiliating peace in February of 1801, the
month of Pitt's resignation. The second coalition went the way of
the first, and Britain was again left alone against the triumphant
revolution.

But her power was far greater than it had been four years earlier.
She was acquiring naval supremacy, learning to use her fleets for
effective blockade, and making the enemy feel the pinch. The price
of blockade, however, as in the Seven Years' War and the War of

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conquered lands, and Britain was inevitably becoming their cham-
pion. Her lone defiance had been the light in a darkening world;
now it was extinguished.

She did not extinguish it from fear, but from weariness. The gov-
ernment acted on the perennial misconception that besets gentle-
men dealing with a worshiper of force: they imagined that the First
Consul wanted peace because to them it was the normal, civilized
condition. He imagined, in turn, that they might be gulled or bul-
lied into keeping the peace while he finished enslaving Europe. The
two sides misjudged each other as completely as Britain and Ger-
many after Munich.

The Peace of Amiens consequently endured little longer than that
of Munich. Bonaparte, now entrenched as First Consul for life and
styling himself Napoleon, moved on to new aggressions as rapidly
as Hitler. French power was riveted upon northwestern Italy, Hol-
land, Switzerland, and western Germany, and preparations were
made to extend it to India, Egypt, the West Indies, and even Loui-
siana. Napoleon hoped that none of his acts would be flagrant
enough to provoke Britain's resistance, and that her passivity would
sap her will to resist. "An intelligent victor will, whenever possible,
present his demands to the vanquished in installments. He can then
be sure that a nation which has become characterless and such is
every one which voluntarily submits will no longer find any suffi-
cient reason in each of these detailed oppressions to take to arms
once more." 5 The words are Hitler's, but the technique was old.

The Corsican adventurer, like the Austrian, miscalculated Brit-
ain's will. She refused to carry out the letter of the treaty on the
ground that Napoleon was violating its spirit, and prepared to re-
new the war. When she declared it again in May 1803 the nation
was united as never before. The months of truce had cleared the air
of false hopes by proving that the consulate was as aggressive as the
republic and even more dangerous. The British still had no inten-
tion of destroying France as a state, and little interest in undoing
her revolution. But they were now determined to fight until dooms-
day, if need be, to destroy her hegemony of Europe.

Although they had no allies, their own strength was at its apogee.

5 Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), p. 968;
quoted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, proprietors of the basic
copyright.

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precisely executed, and precision could not be f^^
fbove aU else: by now the thought of meeting N els on had
numbing effect upon a French admiral that the thought of meeting
NapoLon had upon an Austrian general. The Emperor ignored
these deficiencies in his own force, and he assumed nonexistent ^de-
ficiencies in the British. Nelson was no lonely gemus among fools^
his fellow admirals were supremely competent. To expect them to
be eluded and duped by inferior squadrons under demoralized
commanders was to expect the impossible. The ghost of Pb^hp II
must have looked pityingly after the Spanish fleet as it saied west-
ward from Cadiz on an April evening in 1805.

The gamble had begun. The French commander-in-chief, Admiral
Villeneuve, had escaped from Toulon at the end of March and
picked up the Cadiz detachment; he was on his way to the West In-
dies while Nelson vainly scoured the Mediterranean in search of
him. It was soon known in London that the French were loose in
the Atlantic; orders went out to strengthen the remnants ot toe
blockade and the defenses of the Channel. Villeneuve reached the
West Indies in May, waited for reinforcements that did not appear,
and then, just when Nelson arrived in pursuit, doubled back to
Spain with the British hot on his heels. When he arrived, his initia-
tive was as exhausted as his fleet; after a half-hearted gesture to-
ward the Channel he fell back on Cadiz. The French, without fight-
ing a major battle, had lost their last great naval campaign.

It had for a postscript one of the outstanding battles of history.
Villeneuve, blockaded in Cadiz by a numerically inferior force un-
der Nelson, was being goaded by Napoleon to break out; the Em-
peror was unused to seeing his strategy go bankrupt. On October
19 Villeneuve put to sea with thirty-three sail of the line and the
foreknowledge of defeat; two days later Nelson, with twenty-seven
of the line, turned on him off Cape Trafalgar. The Franco-Spanish
fleet was in a long crescent struggling northward toward Cadiz
when the British bore down on it in two columns. These struck the
enemy center and crushed it before the slow-sailing van returned to
join the battle and be crushed in turn. Eighteen enemy ships were
captured; thirteen battered wrecks escaped into Cadiz. On the Vic-
tory Nelson was dead, hut his work was finished. Napoleon's navy
had ceased to exist as a fighting force.

Trafalgar was the culmination of a long process. British sea

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Pitt did not live to witness the end of his hopes. His years on duty
had sapped his strength, and the news of Austerlitz shattered it. He
died in January 1806, murmuring "my country, how I leave my
country!" But he left it strong enough to do without his strength,
and that fact was his monument. Throughout the rest of the war,
except for a brief coalition under Fox, only little men followed Pitt
in office. As they came and went in Downing Street, Britain's vast
effort went on with little abatement. Its techniques had become so
ingrained that they no longer required one directing hand. "Europe
is not saved by any single man," Pitt had pointed out in his last
speech. "England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I
trust, save Europe by her example."

By 1807 example was no longer enough, because no Continental
state dared emulate it. Britain could defend herself and her friends
within the limits of her power, but the only way in which she could
carry the war to Napoleon was by extending and tightening her
blockade, A military counteroffensive would have to wait on his
blundering, for she could no more invade the continent than he
could invade the British Isles. Blockade was slow and unspectacular,
an instrument of attrition requiring a spider's patience and a spider's
time, but it was far from a negligible weapon. Britain had infinite
time, as she had not had in the American war a generation earlier;
her position now was impregnable.

Come the three comers of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. 6

She had no further enemies to fear. She could afford to wait, and
watch, and spin her web from the Baltic to the Levant.

Napoleon could not wait. He had imposed upon Europe an un-
precedented political unification, but he could not consolidate it
without an economic framework. The Continent was by no means
self-sufficient; its economy had been fed for generations by that of
the Americas and Asia, and in recent years increasingly by that of
Great Britain. Now the Royal Navy restricted this feeding, and the
consequent economic disruption stirred political unrest into an en-
demic crisis. Napoleon had two alternatives. He might accept the
crisis and mitigate its effects as far as possible, trusting to time for
the evolution of an adjusted economy; or he might attack the block-

Shakespeare: King John, V, vii, 116-7.

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consequence, and she had little economic and less military power.
Henceforth her ships might trade solely with Britain and risk cap-
ture by French privateers, or they might carry non-British goods to
Europe and risk capture by the Royal Navy, or they might carry
British goods and risk arrest by French police. The freedom of the
seas was in abeyance.

As the pinch of Napoleon's decrees began to be felt in Britain, she
struggled for markets. She seized for the duration almost all the
overseas colonies of the European states, except in Latin America,
and she made abortive attempts on Chile and Argentine. In the
North Sea she occupied Heligoland as a way station for smuggling
into Germany. In the Mediterranean she used Gibraltar, Malta, Sic-
ily, and the Ionian Isles for the same purpose, and through Turkey
her goods trickled into the Danube Valley. These were small leaks
in Napoleon's blockade, and they led him to strengthen it. Before
he finished, one crucial section broke.

Portugal and Spain were particularly remiss in enforcing the em-
bargo because their governments were weak. Napoleon determined
to occupy the peninsula. He began with a raid on Portugal; then
he kidnapped the Spanish royal family and replaced it with his
brother Joseph, enthroned behind a screen of French bayonets. But
he reckoned without the Spaniards. They were as averse to outside
dictation as they had been a century before, and they preferred a
priest-ridden aristocracy and a despicable sovereign of their own to
reforms and efficiency foisted upon them from Paris. The French
were confronted with popular risings on every side. The revolution
that had battened on nationalism was opposed for the first time, but
not for the last, by a people in arms.

The Spaniards alone were no match for a perfected war machine.
But they had two allies, geography and Great Britain. The moun-
tain ranges of the peninsula, across which ran the roads from
France, were a happy hunting ground for guerrillas acting against
the invaders* lines of communication. Britain now had the oppor-
tunity she had been seeking for fifteen years, to open a land front in
Europe with a fair prospect of maintaining it; the enemy's strength
in the field was counterbalanced by his supply problem, and the
British had the support of the ubiquitous Spanish irregulars and se-
cure access to any part of the coast. The elephant was at last where
the whale could get at him.

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in British ports, with scant regard for their citizenship. The powers
of search and impressment were vital for manning the Royal Navy,
and they were exercised with a highhandedness that the govern-
ment refused to curb. The old anti-British feeling in America soon
drowned out the grievances against France, and at the crisis in the
European struggle the United States declared war. Britain could
afford neither troops nor ships for a large-scale effort, and she had
no objective beyond the defense of Canada. For her the War of
1812 was a regrettable but incidental episode, which forced her to
divert a fraction of her strength from the cause she considered to
be that of all free men.

While her position was being weakened by these developments in
North America, it was being strengthened in another way by events
in South America. The chaos in Spain had broken the ties between
the empire and the mother country. The colonists were asserting
their independence, and with the Spanish connection went the mer-
cantilist system; Britain at last had the market she had been seeking
for a hundred years. She needed it desperately. The Continental
System had brought her industrial areas to depression, hunger, and
rioting, and the Latin American trade helped to keep the wheels
turning through the worst years.

Europe by now was approaching the final crisis. The needs of
Continental blockade had led Napoleon to extend his empire to
Italy, Dalznatia, and the northwestern coast of Germany. But the
Tilsit settlement, on 'which his position still depended, was begin-
ning to crack. The exclusion of colonial produce and British manu-
factures had been unpopular from the start with Russian nobles and
merchants, and the extension of French power in central Europe
was equally unpopular at the Russian court. In 1810-11 Alexander
withdrew from the Continental System, and Anglo-Russian trade
began to return to normal. Napoleon's blockade could now be turned
from the east, and the British imports could flood into a parched
Europe. Napoleon had to act or see his experiment fail.

A Europe insulated from the outside world had become too small
for two imperial powers, much as it became again in 1941. The
Emperor of All the Russias would not turn back; the Emperor of the
French could not, for success had an irresistible momentum. The
Peace of Tilsit therefore went the way of the Peace of Amiens, as

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Prussians had massed over 100,000 under General Bliicher. If the
two armies joined, they would outnumber Napoleon by almost two
to one; he was therefore forced onto the offensive.

He struck his enemies before they joined. He himself attacked
and defeated Bliicher, and decided that he had put him out of the
running; he then advanced to support Marshal Ney, who had mean-
while been engaging the British. Wellington retired on the village
of Waterloo, where he hoped that the Prussians would join him.
There, soon after noon of June 18, Napoleon launched his last as-
sault. Its aim was simple, to crush the British center by sheer weight
of numbers, column against line. Some of his marshals knew from
their Spanish experience what would come of these tactics. The
Emperor mocked them, ^ou were beaten by Wellington, and so
you think he is a great general. But I tell you that Wellington is
a bad general, and the English are bad troops; they will be a picnic
for us."

The picnic was deadly. For hours the French poured themselves
against the Duke's position, while the Prussians moved slowly to his
rescue. By late afternoon Napoleon was attacked in flank by
Bliicher, and still had not broken the British line. But he dared not
stop; anything short of victory would undo him. So the attack went
on until it spent its force; the French center was then rolled into
chaos by the charge of Wellington's last reserves, and the Prussians
completed the rout A mob, not an army, streamed back toward the
French frontier. Napoleon had gambled and lost everything; four
days later he abdicated for the second time, and in July he set out
for St. Helena.

X The Aftermath

THE LONG ordeal was over. For twenty-three years France had
fought to gain and hold the mastery of Europe; she failed only after
the Continent had been ploughed into new shapes and sown with
new ideas. The ploughing could be largely effaced and the surface
of an eighteenth-century world restored, but the seeds had gone
too deep to be killed by a superficial restoration. They germinated
for years, and then thrust violently upward into a new world.

Great Britain, alone among the powers, had not had ideas forced
on her by a conquering army. For her the war had been of a piece
with the wars against Louis XIV, and no one yet realized that that

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Chapter Five

REVOLUTION BY CONSENT
1815-1867

I The Vienna Settlement

TTTTHEN the peacemakers gathered again at Vienna after the in-
VV terruption of the Waterloo campaign, they had the task of
redesigning Europe, Great areas were void on the map: the old
frontiers had been gone for a generation in Italy, in Germany, in
the Vistula basin, and the Napoleonic frontiers were now erased.
Victory had been won primarily by the four great powers; none of
them was weak enough to be deprived of its pre-war holdings, and
neither was France. Inevitably the Congress of Vienna had to create
a new map along the general lines of the old, and so to resurrect a
large measure of the eighteenth century in the second decade of the
nineteenth. On certain basic assumptions the negotiators were
agreed. France, though shorn of her conquests, would remain a
major power; Great Britain's direct concerns would be largely over-
seas; Russia, Austria, and Prussia would gain what they could from
the European grab-bag. The last assumption involved the danger of
war, for eighteenth-century rivalries woke again in the atmosphere
of Vienna. But the ambitions of the rivals were essentially limited,
as they had been in the time of Frederick and Maria Theresa. If
they could be satisfied peacefully at the expense of minor states,
equilibrium would return.

The focus of the old rivalries was in central Europe. There Britain
had little stake, and French influence was temporarily in eclipse;
Austria, Prussia, and Russia snarled at each other. The principal
bone of contention was Poland, which the three had divided among

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lands for Italian Venetia, and Belgium was added to the Dutch
Netherlands to form a single kingdom of Holland; in northwestern
Italy Sardinia was reconstituted and strengthened. Thus the tra-
ditional routes by which France had overrun the Continent were
blocked against her: a single state now garrisoned the Low Coun-
tries, supported by the Prussians in Westphalia and at the mouth of
the Moselle valley; Sardinia, backed by the Austrians in Lombardy-
Venetia, guarded the passes of the Alps. The peacemakers estab-
lished a cordon sanitaire against the common enemy, and in the
process they set the stage for a new Europe.

The settlement was a turning point in the history of the three
Continental victors. Russia acquired a salient between Prussia and
Austria that advanced her frontiers into the heart of the Continent.
Prussia shifted her center of gravity westward, gained what soon
became the industrial core of Germany, and became a guardian of
the German states against France. Austria sacrificed the Nether-
lands for a strong position in central Europe: the newly established
German Confederation -was under her leadership, and in Italy her
possession of Lombardy-Venetia made her the one great power
among the weak and senile governments of the Restoration. For
the next half -century she was a Janus state, looking at once north
and south, and her peculiar position made her the hub of European
politics.

Most of these changes concerned Great Britain only as they re-
established the balance of power, the traditional framework of her
diplomacy. The coastal areas of peculiar importance to her sea
power were unaffected except for the Low Countries, which at last
were entirely on their own; her role thenceforth was to chaperon
them against the advances of Prussia on one side and France on the
other. Britain's satisfaction with the settlement was reflected in the
return of confiscated colonies; she retained only those that the ad-
miralty coveted for strategic reasons, such as Malta, Mauritius, Cey-
lon, and the Dutch settlement on the southern tip of Africa. For the
last she paid in cash, and so bought her greatest imperial problem of
the nineteenth century.

The Vienna settlement dealt with imponderables as well as with
territories, for the danger of French ideas was as great as that of
French aggression. The seeds of nationalism sowed by the revolu-
tion had taken root in central Europe, where the nation-state was

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to some degree willing to collaborate in preserving public order.
This newly found community of interest was epitomized in an old
phrase, the concert of Europe, and the powers at Vienna found the
means for concerting European policy. They agreed to meet in a
future congress whenever the peace of the Continent was threat-
ened, and so they created the congress system. It was short-lived
and had many disadvantages. It was rudimentary because it lacked
a permanent secretariat and fixed times of meeting; it was domi-
nated by the great powers, first the big four and then, after the
admission of France, the big five; its aims were so conservative that
it became identified with reaction. Yet in method it was such an ad-
vance from the anarchy of the past that it was a foretaste of inter-
nationalism.

The system was not designed to be reactionary. Some of its
framers expected it to give the monarchs of Europe such a sense of
security that they would dare to experiment with constitutional re-
form. But the sovereigns restored at long last had little taste for
experiment; as liberal agitation increased, so did their conservatism
and their unpopularity. Did the concert exist to guarantee them
against the consequences of their errors by intervening in the name
of public order whenever and wherever revolution occurred? On
the answer to this crucial question two views developed, so diver-
gent that they vitiated the very idea of concert.

Metternich insisted that revolution anywhere was a threat to the
peace of Europe and should be suppressed as soon as it began
or, if possible, before. In 1819 he took action against the liberal
movement in Germany; in 1820 a liberal outbreak in Spain had re-
percussions in Italy, and he convoked a series of congresses in the
next two years to consider the problem. By now Russia and Prussia
supported him, and France, eager to prove her orthodoxy, offered
to suppress the Spanish revolt. But at the Congress of Verona, in
the autumn of 1822, the Duke of Wellington dropped a bombshell:
Great Britain would have no part in coercing the Spaniards. She was
seceding from the concert, in effect, and shattering the unanimity
on which it depended.

Her decision had been long maturing. At the outset her foreign
secretary, Lord Castlereagh, had been a leading proponent of the
system. The immediate object, 9 * he had said in 1815, "is to inspire
the states of Europe with a sense that the existing concert is their

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that no line could be drawn between the internal affairs of a state
and the peace of Europe, and that control by the powers could be
effective only if exercised everywhere and always. The British in-
sisted that a line could and must be drawn, and that only when the
general peace was palpably threatened was internal intervention
admissible. In Vienna unlimited surveillance seemed the one hope
for peace; in London such surveillance seemed a rule of force as
intolerable as the Napoleonic.

The point at issue was fundamental in any international system,
whether a concert of Europe or a League of Nations or a United
Nations. It is all very well to say, as the British did in the 1820's,
that international pressure must be applied only when the peace is
threatened. But at precisely what point do the developing forces of
aggression within a state come to threaten the community of states?
The question is unanswerable, and so was that aspect of the Aus-
trian argument. If international pressure, on the other hand, is ap-
plied to block all revolutionary developments within a state on the
chance that they will become threatening, the system is a static
despotism. These dangers are the horns of the dilemma inherent in
an international system, and of the two the British preferred the
danger of revolutions to the danger of tyranny.

The risings of 1820 brought the issue to a head. Austria sup-
pressed the Italian rebels, but Italy would not be secure until Spain
also was made safe for reaction. Metternich approved the project
of a French invasion of Spain, which disturbed the British pro-
foundly because it conjured up the ghost of the eighteenth-century
entente between the French and Spanish Bourbons. Latin America
was again involved. The Spanish colonies had never fully resumed
their broken allegiance and were now asserting their independence.
They were an important British market; if the old regime were re-
established in Madrid, an attempt would almost surely follow to
re-establish it in America, and the commercial gains of this restora-
tion would accrue to France. Largely for that reason Britain dissoci-
ated herself at Verona from the French design on Spain, and pub-
lished die fact that the unanimity of the powers was ended.

Irx the spring of 1823 France went ahead regardless, and soon
crushed the liberal government of Spain. Britain then took a hand.
Castlereagh had died and been succeeded in the Foreign Office by
George Canning, who had long and openly opposed the idea of the

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pected as much when he had heard of Canning's overtures and
spoken of marrying Britain's fleet. "By acceding to her proposition
we detach her from the bands, bring her mighty weight into the
scale of free government, and emancipate a continent at one stroke.'*

The effect of emancipation was incalculable. The western hem-
isphere, a focus of European political expansion since the days of
the Conquistadores, was suddenly and permanently closed to it. For
the next century European powers pressed outward into Africa, the
Near East, and the Orient, creating wars and crises from Port Ar-
thur to Fez; during almost the whole of that time the Americas
were left to work out their own destiny under the aegis first of Brit-
ish and then of American sea power. In the process the old hostility
between Great Britain and the United States gave place to a largely
unrecognized partnership.

The American crisis was no more than settled before events were
pushing the Tory government toward the support of liberalism in a
quite different area. The semicircle of land bordering the eastern
Mediterranean, from the Balkans through Asia Minor to Egypt, had
been the scene of rivalries between great powers since the wars of
Rameses and the Hittites. Britain's strategic interest in the area
dated from the formation of her Indian empire, for the Isthmus of
Suez was the one portage on her most direct route to the East. If she
had not previously had serious rivals, except for Napoleon's incur-
sion, the chief reason had been the existence of the Ottoman Em-
pire. The whole region from the border of Hungary to the edge of
the Sudan was at least nominally under the rule of the sultan, whose
government was too weak to dose Britain's road to the East, too slip-
pery to become the puppet of any power, and yet strong enough to
prevent a stronger state from entrenching itself on the Mediterra-
nean coast. For these reasons the maintenance of the Turkish Em-
pire served Britain's interest admirably.

But the decay of the empire, which culminated in the twentieth
century, was well under way in the early nineteenth. Russia was
pressing against the Turkish frontiers at both ends of the Black Sea,
Austria in the Danube valley, and the upheaval of the Napoleonic
Wars had begun to release the forces of nationalism among the
Balkan peoples. The Serbs had already wrung a large measure of au-
tonomy from the sultan, and in the early 1820's the Greeks also rose

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and won major gains for himself; the most Wellington could achieve
was to have the Greek problem submitted to the arbitration of the
three powers. The upshot, in 1831-2, was the creation of an inde-
pendent Greece under the guardianship of France, Russia, and

Britain.

The whole affair was scarcely a triumph for British diplomacy.
But a major point had been won, in that Greece did not become a
Russian satellite. Nicholas had ignored the wishes of Metternich
and shown, not for the last time, that the reactionary solidarity of
the east-European powers weighed little against Russia's Balkan
ambitions. Great Britain and France had contained those ambi-
tions by collaborating with Russia, and so had established a triangu-
lar balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean. It was unstable
but lasted for another forty years, during which the three powers
eyed each other askance; whenever one became unduly aggressive,
the other two drew together in opposition. The effect was to serve
Britain's underlying interest by preserving what remained of the Ot-
toman Empire.

The developments of the 1820's, in summary, began the transfor-
mation of Britain from a tacit supporter of reaction to a friend of the
oppressed and weak. She broke with the Continental powers over
Spain; she defied them over South America, and in the pursuit of her
own interests assumed the protection of a hemisphere. Her policy
toward Greece was more hesitant because it was based on conflict-
ing factors sympathy with the rebels, fear of Russia, reluctance to
undermine the Turkish buffer. Her intervention, nevertheless, helped
to flout again the principles of Metternich and to establish another
independent state. Her prestige was increasing in the eyes of Eu-
rope's liberals. But before she could become their champion she had
to liberalize herself at home.

Ill The Genesis of Reform

IN British domestic history the years after Waterloo are often
known as the Tory Reaction. To reformers the government seemed
to have accepted as its guiding principle the Austrian adage, "gov-
ern, and change nothingl" The Tories had, in fact, an almost Vien-
nese dread of revolution. They were not at heart reactionaries, but
they had to deal with increasing hunger, pauperism, and discontent,

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ministry fused with dislike of the sovereign, and pressure from "the
majority without doors" forced the government to abandon the di-
vorce proceedings. The humiliation shook the throne itself.

Two years later the death of Castlereagh precipitated a reorgan-
ization of the cabinet. New men and new policies appeared. The sys-
tem of hired informers was abolished and the penal code modern-
ized; the navigation acts were amended to encourage colonial trade
with foreign powers; the ban on workers* organizations was re-
scinded. TThese measures were the entering wedge of reform, and
they had the usual effect of splitting the party in power. The split,
largely concealed while Canning lived, cracked the surface of Tory-
ism soon after Wellington became Prime Minister. In 1828 the Test
and Corporation Acts were repealed as they applied to dissent.
Their provisions had long been in abeyance, suspended by annual
acts of Parliament, and repeal was primarily a symbol that Whig
principles had triumphed. But it had another effect: the emancipa-
tion of dissent inevitably accentuated the issue of Catholic emanci-
pation. This question, which Pitt had sidestepped and his succes-
sors had not dared to touch, completed the disruption of the Tory
party. It thereby burst the dam holding back the flood waters of
reform.

The Act of Union had not cured Ireland's political grievances, and
her economic problems had grown worse. Because her capital was
now London, many of her great landholders no longer came near
their Irish estates but left the peasants to the mercies of stewards
and farmers. These agents were calloused by their own position.
They had to send to the landlords every penny due, and in time of
blight and famine they were powerless to temper their demands on
the tenantry. In time of abundance, conversely, the tenant was pe-
nalized for any attempt to better his holding; improvements in-
creased its value and therefore its rent. At all times he had to pay
tithes for the detested Anglican Church in Ireland while supporting
his own church by voluntary offerings. Absenteeism, a legal system
that encouraged squalor, and the curse of tithes were grievances at
the core of the Irish problem, and no change in the political surface
could erase them.

Another factor, still largely unrecognized, was even more impor-
tant. The Irish population was beginning to outgrow the available
land. The effect of the increasing shortage of arable was felt particu-

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of its influence remained throughout the nineteenth century. But
the political taproot was cut. For the first time Catholic Ireland had
a constitutional focus in the House of Commons, where its griev-
ances could be aired by more civilized means than murder, arson,
and revolt. For the next forty years the airing produced few tangi-
ble results; it seemed to be no more than wind against the rock of
British conservatism, while in Ireland the old cycle of violence and
repression went on. During those years, however, the Catholic lead-
ers acquired a political training in the school of frustration at West-
minster. Their hope was essentially the same, generation after gen-
erationpeaceful independence through repeal of the union. The
hope was blocked on one side by British intransigence and threat-
ened on the other by Irish revolutionaries; generation after genera-
tion it failed. But out of failure and bloodshed it developed into a
cause that could not be ignored. The Irish Catholic members in the
Commons cohered into a party, which grew in importance as Home
Rule grew into the dominant issue of British politics. These were
the seeds of the future, hidden in Catholic emancipation.

The immediate effects were disruptive in a different way. To the
orthodox Tory, Wellington and Peel had betrayed the principles of
the party as indeed they had. On its ecclesiastical side Toryism
had rested upon the Clarendon Code and the Test Act; now the
Anglicans shared political power with dissenters and Catholics. On
its constitutional side Toryism had rested on the assumption that the
time-tested fabric of the state was inviolable; now the need of
change in Ireland had been recognized, and the logic of resisting
change at home was undermined. The Tory philosophy that had
prevailed in Britain for almost half a century was going bankrupt.

Wellington refused to see the implications of what he had done or
to admit that further change might be necessary. But his party was
dissolving around him. The left wing was breaking away toward
the Whig camp, and the right wing suspected even the Duke of a
secret sympathy with reform. Only his prestige and the favor of a
reactionary king kept the Prime Minister in office. Then suddenly,
in June 1830, George IV rendered his people the service of dying.
He was succeeded by his brother William, a bluff and simple man
with mildly liberal views. The accession of the new King automati-
cally dissolved Parliament and necessitated a general election.

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etics there were, on the right and on the left But the majority -ac-
cepted the tenets of classical liberalism, which became the faith of
Victorian Britain. .

Complacency was short-lived. The faith contained paradoxical
seeds of change that sprouted in a changing economy. A new Tory-
ism arose to challenge the orthodox position. Europe refused to be
converted and grew more militantly pagan, until the fire and iron of
the Bismarck era forced the British to reappraise their values. Under
the prodding of necessity liberal leaders began their slow movement
toward the left -from Earl Grey to Gladstone, from Gladstone to
Lloyd George - until eventually the remnant of the party was swal-
lowed in modern British socialism. Along the way segments became
detached, pined the Tories, and passed on their heritage to modern
conservatism. The reactionary of today lias much in common with
the pre-Victorian Whig, and the moderate Tory, whether American
or British, often speaks in Gladstonian terms. The metamorphosis of
classical liberalism, in short, is a central phenomenon in the evolu-
tion of modern political ideas.

The Whigs who triumphed with Grey were far from the modern
liberal. They were no more democratic than Wellington, for then-
whole tradition was oligarchic; they had resisted Jacobinism as
stoutly as the Tories, and still denied as hotly that the franchise was
one of the rights of man. For them it was a privilege inherently con-
nected with property; as for the unpropertied masses, the Whig felt
with Charles I that "their having a share in the government ... is
nothing appertaining to them." This attitude seems illiberal today,
when the idea of universal suffrage is accepted in theory and cur-
tailed only in practice, but a century ago it seemed self-evident.
The masses were illiterate and nearly destitute; enfranchising them
would open the way for any demagogue who promised to transfer
the wealth of the country from rich to poor by use of the taxing
power. The bulk of the reformers accepted the principle of minority
rule. They wished to confine political power to those who had a
stake in the existing order, and to extend the franchise only as the
number of property-owners increased.

Where the Whigs differed from the Tories was in the criterion of
property. Because the landed interest had traditionally been the
core of the oligarchy and land the basis of taxation, the conservative
insisted that the only constitutional guarantee of stability was a

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trine that the self-interest of each is enlightened enough to make the
sum of interests social good, not social evil. These two sources were
largely intangible, but a third was concrete and peculiar to the pe-
riod. Laissez faire satisfied the specific self-interest of the industri-
alists. As they translated the phrase, it meant hands off business, and
their economic doctrine was the logical extension of this idea.

They were as rugged individualists in the economic sphere as the
Puritans had been in the spiritual, and they had the same impa-
tience of state interference. If government left them alone, they
could run their mine or mill or shop on any terms the market would
bear terms of wages and hours, of housing, of working conditions,
of the labor of women and children. Their desire for free trade in
the labor market was dignified as a natural right of the individual,
the right to freedom of contract. This dogma of economic liberalism
asserted that a workman should be free to sell his labor on whatever
conditions he chose to accept, and that his freedom should not be
curtailed by the state or any other extraneous agency. A factory act
to limit hours and a trade union designed for collective bargaining
were equally infringements of free contract. As the liberal opposed
them in theory, so the industrialist opposed them in his own inter-
ests. Because a laborer who was free to contract was free from the
means of raising his wage by collective bargaining, the new princi-
ple worked itself out on the books of industry in pounds, shillings,
and pence.

Economic liberalism had sweeping implications for foreign and
imperial policy. The liberal believed that government should not
only be limited but cheap; his ideal was a small, trained bureauc-
racy functioning within a narrowly circumscribed sphere. He was
the inveterate enemy of militarism, with its vast and costly estab-
lishment, and of war as the greatest extravagance and the greatest
unreason in which a nation can indulge. He was convinced that wars
grew from economic rivalries, expressed in tariffs, and he looked for-
ward to a day when free trade would usher in the utopia of peace.
For all these reasons he deplored armaments and advocated a for-
eign policy of logic and negotiation, not of force.

His attitude toward the empire derived from the same premises.
Britain's colonies yielded her a dubious profit, which he expected to
see evaporate with the advent of free trade, and involved her in the
perennial danger of war. Colonial status, furthermore, meant to him

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Thereupon both sides joined to lock the door against the mass of the
people.

The Tories had prevented revolution by giving way, and had kept
their party intact. For the next fourteen years they struggled to pre-
serve the share of power left them, while the Whigs struggled to
complete their victory by enacting their liberal program. The Tories
lost, essentially because they no longer had a tenable position. Its
two traditional fortresses had been sapped, the Crown and the
House of Lords, and even reactionaries realized that the majority in
the Commons was henceforth sovereign. Far more important, the
principle of change had been admitted. The constitution, set in its
mold since the Glorious Revolution, was now shaken into fluidity
again, and the only question was how fast it would be altered in the
future.

V The Fruits of Liberalism

IN the years immediately after 1832 reform was at full flood. Prob-
lems at home and throughout the empire, some of them going back
for generations, were raised for discussion and settlement in the
new House of Commons. The East India Company was deprived of
its last remaining commercial privileges and reduced to an agency
of government. Slavery, which had been forbidden as a traffic in
1807, was abolished as an institution, and colonial slaveholders were
compensated to the tune of 20,000,000. At home the boroughs
were modernized; the close and corrupt corporations gave place to
elected councils, and municipal administration soon became a model
of enlightenment. A hesitant first move was made in financing ele-
mentary education* Child labor in textile mills was curtailed by an
act liberal in its mechanism (a centralized, bureaucratic staff of in-
spectors) but a departure in spirit from liberal orthodoxy. Parlia-
ment was Tin will ing to sacrifice children to the principle of laissez
faire.

Almost simultaneously liberalism was triumphing in another so-
cial field. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was reform long
overdue. The Elizabethan system of poor relief had broken down
under the pressure of industrialization and the long years of war,
and since the turn of the century pauperism had become the most
pressing social problem before the country. The authorities had at-
tempted to solve it by doling out public money to bring wages up

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scious, as never before, that his betters had deserted him. Previ-
ously he had received a slipshod charity; whatever he had paid for
it in self-respect, he at least had not felt a pariah. Now his poverty
was tantamount to crime, and was dealt with in a flint-like prison
where life was designedly reduced to the edge of starvation. Hatred
of the workhouses and of the oligarchy responsible for them was
widespread among English laborers; the shadow of what they called
the Bastilles fell on them all. They had played their part in agitating
and rioting for the Reform Bill; politically it had brought them noth-
ing, and socially it had brought them the bitter fruit of the poor
law. Small wonder that they felt betrayed.

Their "bitter discontent grown fierce and mad," as Carlyle called
it, gradually took form as chartism. This was a movement unique in
British history. It was entirely proletarian, and it was revolutionary.
Not since the days of Cromwell had the common people so troubled
the waters of government, and the Levellers had been a ripple by
comparison with the chartists. In 1836-7 agitation began simultane-
ously in different parts of England, and soon crystallized in the
"people's charter" from which it took its name. The six points of the
charter were all political, and all radical: universal manhood suf-
frage, vote by secret ballot, equal electoral districts, annual parlia-
ments, the abolition of property qualifications for members of the
House of Commons, and the payment of members. These demands
foreshadowed the democratic state. They were premature, for mid-
dle-class liberalism had not yet begun to spend its force. But their
appearance was more than an augury of the future. They focused
attention on Carlyle's two nations, the rich and the poor, and proved
that the liberals had not begun to answer his "condition of England
question." They set men to thinking in new ways, shook the compla-
cent theorists of laissez f aire, and prepared the ground for a new
liberalism and a new conservatism.

The movement itself had no chance of success. The chartist lead-
ers were divided between advocates of legal agitation and of vio-
lence, and both methods were hopeless from the start. The oligarchy
was not open to peaceful persuasion; its members, regardless of
party or social standing, -were a solid phalanx against this threat
from without. Force was equally impossible; even if the chartists
had been agreed on its use, they lacked the necessary coherence and
discipline. Successful revolution is not made by the unprivileged

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ingman. It shifted his interest from the abstraction of the vote to
the concrete reality of a loaf of bread, and the struggle to cheapen
his daily bread gave him experience in the ways of campaigning.
The chartists had brought him only frustration; this campaign, as it
swelled to its triumphant climax, showed him that he had a real, if
indirect, political weight. The "condition of England" question was
entering a new phase.

The effect of the campaign on the upper classes was much more
immediate than on the workers. The crisis of 1832 had shaken the
principle of minority rule but left it intact, and victors and van-
quished had soon agreed that the reform bill was a final settlement;
they remained primarily oligarchs and only secondarily Whigs and
Tories. In the 1840's their agreement melted in the heat of another
argument and another crisis. The Whigs took their cause to the na-
tion, and organized such support in the people at large as would
have scandalized Lord Grey. They won, but at a price. They could
never erase the memory of their party's appeal to the unenfran-
chised, and before long the remnants of the Tories were persuaded
to make their own appeal. Thus the Whig triumph split the oli-
garchy again, this time beyond repair, and so made possible the later
rise of a democratic liberalism and a democratic conservatism.

The attack on the corn law had been impending for a generation.
As soon as the industrialists had won power in the House of Com-
mons, they had begun to work toward their economic objectives.
The chief one was free trade, and the keystone of the whole protec-
tionist system was the corn law; by it the system would stand or fall.
The assumptions on which the law rested were under attack from
the theoretical economists, whose arguments could for once be trans-
lated into popular terms. The landed interest that defended the law
was a formidable but relatively isolated group, which drew its
strength from grain and would weaken if grain prices fell. Hence
the assault on the corn law served not only the economic purpose of
securing free trade, but also the political purpose of upsetting the
balance struck in 1832 and completing the triumph of industrial
liberalism.

The cause of repeal, like that of reform a generation earlier, was
not initiated by the Whigs. The party was converted by a group of
liberals operating outside regular political channels, appealing to al-
most every segment of the population, and controlling as effective

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voters and the unenfranchised; it appealed to everyone except the
landlord, in varying terms but on one specific issue, and it accord-
ingly tapped the most disparate sources of unrest.

The agitation for repeal was blocked by a Tory majority in Parlia-
ment. TTbe Whigs had shared the fate of most reform administra-
tions: the more liberal measures they had passed, the smaller their
following had become. Sir Robert Peel, the new Tory leader, had
rebuilt his party and brought it to power in 1841 with a substantial
majority. He had labored long and with considerable success to ed-
ucate it in the acceptance of change; in time he might even have
weaned it away from protection, as he -was being -weaned. His expe-
rience in office suggested that tariff reduction increased revenue by
increasing consumption. He was able to learn from experience and
even, unlike most politicians, from the arguments of his opponents.
Once he was convinced, he had the moral stature to follow his con-
viction at the cost of his career and his party. Such a man was not
the one to lead a last-ditch defense of the corn law.

Peel's political tragedy arose from the pressure of time. The tariff
might have been reduced by cautious stages to the vanishing point,
but matters came to a head too fast. In September 1845 it became
known that the Irish potato crop was diseased, and during the au-
tumn the news grew steadily worse. The English grain crop had
failed as well, and at least half the Irish peasants would soon have
to be fed on grain; the alternative was famine beyond all imagining.
The Anti-Corn-Law League made full use of its opportunity, and
public excitement grew explosive. Peel realized that the corn law, if
once suspended, could never be reimposed, but he could not per-
suade the cabinet to recommend repeal. The bulk of the Tories
dung to their old belief s that the price of grain was the gauge of
their prosperity and power, and that the country's traditional insti-
tutions were rooted in the land and would collapse if the roots were
tampered with. Against their obstinacy Peel was helpless. He re-
fused to lead them in what he considered their battle for reaction,
and they refused to f ollow Tifrn in what they considered betrayal.

He resigned. The Whig leader, Lord John Russell, had at last
come out for repeal, but he could not form a ministry. The Tories
still controlled the House, and the emergency was too acute for a
general election. Peel returned to office. Only he could force repeal
on suet a parliament, and he was determined to do it at the cost of

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law ended the protective system: duties intended to regulate the
flow of trade were promptly removed and the navigation acts re-
pealed, and by 1850 Britain was the world's one great exemplar of
free trade.

VI Liberalism and the Empire

ECONOMIC liberalism was exposed to the test of experience, and
the result was enormously gratifying to the faithful. British indus-
try boomed, and British agriculture to the discomfiture of the Jere-
miahs throve almost equally. This prosperity convinced the liberal
that the rest of the world would be led by self-interest to emulate
Britain. The maze of tariff walls would then disintegrate, goods
would flow freely everywhere, and Utopia would be at hand. Under
the light of reason and the warmth of profit international friction
would melt away

Till the war drum throbbed no longer and the battle flags were furled
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world. 2

This was the liberal's hope. Ingenuous as it looks a century later,
in 1850 it seemed for good reason to be in process of realization.
Progress was not a theory, but a demonstrated fact. Science and in-
vention were rapidly bettering man's lot, industrialism was bringing
him a prosperity without perceptible limit, and in this vast ameliora-
tion the British were taking the lead. God, as Milton had pointed
out two hundred years before, had a -way of revealing Himself first
to Englishmen, and God was now working through the machine.

This conviction was not blasphemous. Victorian liberalism had in
it a strong religious element, from which it derived much of its cru-
sading zeal. The evangelical's emphasis on good works had made a
deeper impression on society than his emphasis on sin, partly be-
cause works were more comprehensible to the hard-working, indi-
vidualistic middle class, partly because works could be assimilated
as the concept of sin could not with the rationalist's idea that
man is good and is progressing toward Utopia. This assimilation
produced the liberal's faith that the New Jerusalem could be built
by unfettering private enterprise and private philanthropy, by elim-
inating grievances between nations, classes, and individuals, by ex-
panding legal and economic freedom. The central article of faith,

* Tennyson: "Locksley Hall," 1842.

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the eighteenth century; the Napoleonic Wars had proved to the
maritime states of the Continent that their colonial riches were pre-
carious while Britain ruled the seas, and the post-war era brought
those states so many internal problems that they had little energy to
spare for their external possessions. The great age of industrial im-
perialism, on the other hand, did not begin until after the wars of
national unification in the 1860's. In the half-century between Wa-
terloo and Sadowa the future British dominions grew in the labora-
tory of self-government, with little interference from outside powers.

Their growth was accelerated by a second factor, emigration from
the mother country. In Britain industrialization and improvements
in public health contributed to such a sharp rise of population that
there were not enough jobs to go around, and in Ireland there were
neither enough tenements nor enough potatoes. The most enterpris-
ing, by tens of thousands every year, gambled on opportunity across
the sea. They helped to push back the wilderness in Canada, to set-
tle the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, and to begin the trans-
formation of the small colony at the Cape of Good Hope into the
Union of South Africa. But their arrival was not an unmixed bless-
ing, for everywhere they upset the colonial status quo. The French
Canadians grew fearful that they would be swamped by Anglo-
Saxons; the penal colonies in Australia suddenly became an anach-
ronism; the settlement of New Zealand brought trouble with the
fierce natives, the Maoris; the British in South Africa were soon at
loggerheads with the Dutch. These difficulties were the price of
sudden growth, and they concerned the home government as much
as the colonists.

A third factor in imperial development was the Victorian's zeal
for religion. Evangelicalism was not channeled entirely into the
evangel of free trade; it also produced a missionary movement that
touched the remotest corners of the empire. The abolition of the
slave trade and then of slaveholding had been due in great part to
the missionaries* influence at home, but their influence did not stop
there. Whenever one of them brought a group of natives into the
Christian fold, he became their defender against exploitation by the
whites. His defense was backed by a powerful organization in Brit-
ain, for the missionary societies exerted political pressure through
the pulpit and the press and, more directly, through a group of
evangelical bureaucrats in the Colonial Office. If the settlers in New

Star of Empire

liberal hated war, militarism, and strong government and hoped for
the advent of universal peace, it was natural for him to become an
anti-imperialist.

Like his intellectual ancestor, the eighteenth-century rationalist,
he ignored a number of imponderables. Chief among them was the
character of colonial nationalism. The colonists were intensely proud
of their autonomy, but few of them wished to carry it to the point of
independence. They were beset with dangers the Maoris for the
New Zealanders, the Kaffirs and Zulus for the South Africans, the
United States for the Canadians and the long arm of British
power was comfortable in time of crisis. Self-interest as 'well as sen-
timent held them within the empire, and they had no intention of
being pushed out of it. Their attitude, even more than the support
they received in Great Britain, prevented the breakup of the em-
pire. But the anti-imperialists did contribute to the extension of self-
government; their dislike of empire, consequently, was instrumental
in building a kind of empire of which they never dreamed.

The chief focus of liberal experimentation during this period was
Canada. There the problem of autonomy was not complicated by
backward natives as in South Africa and New Zealand, or by penal
settlements as in Australia. The Canadians had troubles of their
own. The constitutional relations between the elected provincial
legislatures and the executives responsible to the Crown were ini-
tially almost unworkable; the British immigrants were at odds with
the French; annexation by the United States was a constant threat.
The situation grew steadily worse until the beginning of Victoria's
reign. Thereafter the roots of trouble were gradually eliminated by
the loyalty and level-headedness of the Canadians and the vision
and forbearance of the home government, until thirty years later
Canada was setting the pace of imperial development.

The crisis came in 1837. The friction that had been growing for
years at last erupted in rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, the
modern Ontario and Quebec. Both were suppressed without great
difficulty, but they thrust the whole Canadian problem on the atten-
tion of the home government. One of its most radical members, the
Earl of Durham, was sent to investigate conditions, and in 1839 he
published his Report on the Affairs of British North America. This
great document enunciated the principles on which the subsequent
development of the dominions has been based. Durham^ central

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and his dislike of the tax-collector. The Dutch authorities had not
had an easy time with them, and the British were soon in hot water.

The two peoples might have learned to collaborate, as the British
and French were learning in Canada, if they had had the colony to
themselves. But together they were a tiny white minority in a land
thick with blacks, and the Negro question accentuated the diver-
gence between Englishman and Boer. To the Colonial Office and the
missionary the natives were children to be converted and protected
against exploitation. To the Boer they were to be either tamed into
serving him or driven before him off the land. His iron hand with
servants scandalized the missionaries and evoked intervention from
Downing Street, to which his answer was escape into tie wild veldt.

There he was soon involved in more serious difficulties. The re-
quirements of his flocks impelled him to possess large areas for him-
self and his sons; he felt crowded if he could see a neighbor's chim-
ney-smoke across the veldt. This land hunger inevitably spelled
trouble; it meant that a single Boer family required a space that
might support a whole native tribe. The farther the Boers expanded,
the more hostility they roused in the tribesmen and the greater the
danger to all of white South Africa. When a crisis came, the Boers
were glad of British troops; when it passed, they reasserted their
right to do as they pleased. They were consequently an administra-
tive problem that surpassed the wisdom of government.

Trouble first came to a head when slavery was abolished through-
out the empire. The Boers felt that they were inadequately compen-
sated, and were bitter over the loss of their property and the dislo-
cation of their labor supply. Their grievances were fanned to -white
heat when the Colonial Secretary warned them, from the safe dis-
tance of London, that the natives were victims of "systematic injus-
tice*' and must be left unmolested. The most energetic Boers there-
upon took to the wilderness. They preferred its freedom and
dangers to living under a government that stple their slaves and cod-
dled their enemies.

The Great Trek of 1836-7 burst the old frontiers of Cape Colony
to the northeast. The Boers spread across the basins of the Orange
and Vaal Rivers the future Orange Free State and Transvaal
and then crossed the mountains eastward to the coast of Natal,
breaking the natives* power as they went. The British government
was puzzled and alarmed. In its eyes the Boers were British citi-

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terlands were untouched. By 1867 the coastal settlements had ex-
panded inland, thanks primarily to the railroad, and their popula-
tions had multiplied as fantastically as their areas; already they
were embryonic nations. This phenomenon created such tensions as
had lost the United States to Britain; if imperial policy had again
been in the hands of a North and a George III, the empire would
doubtless have split again. Instead the liberals applied, wherever
they could and as far as they dared, their panacea of freedom.
They tempered its application to local conditions and to the argu-
ments of missionaries and scientific reformers, but on the whole
they used it with singular courage. Although many of them ex-
pected, and some would have welcomed, the secession of the colo-
nies, their policy had a different outcome. It helped to fashion a
family of nations united by the bonds that Burke had glimpsed
"the close affection that grows from common names, from kindred
blood, from similar privileges and equal protection. These are ties
which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron."

VII Threats to Liberalism

THE LIBERAL'S outlook on the empire was enlightened and toler-
ant, and above all progressive; the concept of progress was at the
core of Victorian thinking. Change was assumed to be the means to-
ward a better day, and change in the empire was only one example.
The world seemed orderly, for all the speed of its advance. Natural
laws were more complex than they had been for the eighteenth cen-
tury, and natural rights had broadened into economic principles.
But nature was still inherently law-abiding, man inherently rational,
and his reason "was progressively subjugating nature. In this daz-
zling conquest the British saw themselves as the vanguard, and they
assumed with some justice, if little logic, that their enlightenment
and strength would keep them permanently in the van.

But by the 1850*s shadows were already falling across the line of
march, and on the horizon were flickerings that were not the serene
sunshine of reason. Progress, in Europe as a whole, was turning out
to be advance toward a world quite unlike that in which liberal or-
thodoxy had begun, and even less like Utopia. Orthodox principles
were still strong, but their ascendancy was coming into question.
New forces at work on the Continent were beginning to evoke an

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to that of Louis Napoleon, the Emperor's nephew, who by 1852 was
established as Napoleon III. This return of caesarism aroused sus-
picion in the powers, but they did not move. Great Britain, even if
she had been in a position to protest alone, had little incentive to

do so.

Her interests did not seriously conflict with those of the new
French regime. She had fought the first Napoleon partly to defend
her empire, partly to break his grip on Europe. The new Napoleon
was intent on winning her friendship, and confined his overseas am-
bitions to areas where she had little stake. On the Continent he
showed no sign of regaining his uncle's conquests, although his at-
tempt to maintain French influence in central Europe involved him
more and more deeply in the problems of German and Italian uni-
fication. These problems loomed larger in the Tuileries than in
Downing Street. Britain's strategic interest in Italy was secure what-
ever happened, for not even a united Italian kingdom would dare,
in the predictable future, to challenge the mistress of the Mediter-
ranean. Britain's strategic interest in Germany had previously been
premised on her tie with Hanover and her need of an ally against
France. Now Hanover, which descended in the male electoral line,
had been lost since the accession of Victoria, and France was no
longer the great menace. At the beginning of tie nineteenth cen-
tury Britain had still needed German help against France; at the be-
ginning of the twentieth she needed French help against Germany.
In the interval between she could afford detachment from the af-
fairs of western Europe.

The affairs of eastern Europe and Asia, however, were of grow-
ing concern to her. There her rivalry with Russia was becoming a
major diplomatic factor. British trade was expanding, from the
Levant to the China coast, and Russia was simultaneously expand-
ing across the land mass of Eurasia; as the points of contact between
the two empires increased, so did the friction* Russia occupied the
interior position, and she could back her policy with the threat of
enormous manpower. Only in India did Britain possess a com-
parable force; elsewhere she was dependent upon sea power, which
in itself was no match for the Russian armies. She therefore had to
have an ally, actual or potential, and her capacity to find one de-
termined her effectiveness in every major crisis.

By 1852 Russian penetration toward the Persian Gulf and the

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strong allies; Napoleon saw the prospect, if worst came to worst,
of winning prestige while the British bore the brunt of the fighting;
Palmerston preferred war to retreat. In these circumstances war
came.

In the autumn of 1853 the Turks declared war, and in the follow-
ing spring France and Britain joined them. The logical target was
the Russian Black Sea fleet, on which depended the enemy's drive
toward the straits; the war therefore resolved itself into an attack
on the Crimean naval base at Sevastopol. The great fortress was
besieged for a year, one of the grimmest in British military annals.
The organization of supply was appalling, the medical service worse;
even the work of Florence Nightingale and her fellow nurses was
only a small light in the gloom. For the first time war correspondents
reported conditions to the British public, and the resultant outcry
forced reform; Palmerston became Prime Minister and modernized
that departmental dinosaur, the War Office. Simultaneously Czar
Nicholas died, and soon afterward the fall of Sevastopol and its
fleet paved the way for settlement. Napoleon III invited a Euro-
pean congress to meet in Paris, and in the spring of 1856 the treaty
of peace was signed.

Its principal points were two. The sick man of Europe was resusci-
tated: Russia renounced any exclusive interest in the Rumanian
principalities, which became autonomous; the integrity of the Ot-
toman state was guaranteed by the powers, and they bound them-
selves not to intervene in its internal affairs. The Black Sea was neu-
tralized: Russia promised not to rebuild the fleet she had lost, and
she and the Turks agreed to maintain no arsenals on the coast.
These were the terms the allies had bought with thousands of lives
and millions of pounds, and the settlement was precarious from the
start.

The alliance by which it had been done was already dissolving.
Napoleon had posed as the champion of liberalism against autoc-
racy, of the Roman Church against the Greek; he had won his war
and brought Europe to him in congress assembled. His restless am-
bition veered from the Near East to Italy, and soon he was prepar-
ing for a quarrel with Austria by conciliating Russia. The British
were disillusioned: the man 'was like a drop of mercury, bright,
quick, and unpredictable; by working with him they had learned
to distrust him for the rest of his career. That distrust had profound

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Company's dominion. Only in a few provinces did the mutiny ap-
proximate a national movement; elsewhere it was the uprising of a
privileged military caste against its masters. The courage of British
officers and bureaucrats was equal to the emergency that their short-
sightedness had helped to produce; many of the sepoys remained
loyal, and the ruling princes were either passive spectators or active
allies of the British. By the end of the year the worst danger was
over, and the rising slowly petered out in guerrilla warfare.

British India had been shaken to its foundations. The immediate
effect was the extinction of the Company: in 1858 the Crown as-
sumed sole authority, and a new era began. Under the aloof pater-
nalism of the viceroys public works were begun, financed by British
investors and guaranteed on the security of the Indian revenues; In-
dia soon became one of the most lucrative markets in the world for
British capital. But her rulers had had their sense of security shat-
tered, and they tended to draw apart into an administrative Olym-
pus. At the same time the sprawling subcontinent was pulled to-
gether by roads, telegraphs, and, above all, railroads. The spread of
education created an Indian intelligentsia familiar with Western
thought and speaking English as its lingua franca, and the growing
civil service included a small percentage of natives. The new era
-was the seed-time of Indian nationalism.

In summary, then, certain aspects of British policy in the 1850*s
showed an illiberal toughening. Expansion in India led to mutiny;
mutiny led to firmer, more paternalistic government. Russian pres-
sure upon the Turk evoked counterpressure from London, and the
resultant war left Britain with a commitment to support one of the
most despicable governments in Europe. All this scarcely seemed
to the liberal like the road to utopia. And it was not the only trend
that troubled him. Some of his basic assumptions about domestic as
well as foreign affairs were coming under attack. The Tories, who
had seemed to be intellectually defunct, were showing a vigor un-
known since the days of Burke. They were challenging the domi-
nant, complacent creed of liberalism, and they were soon to find sup-
port among heretics within the Liberal Party. Orthodoxy was being
pushed onto the defensive.

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The materialism of the early Victorian era, mirrored in the program
of the liberals, was breeding discontent in the lower classes and
frustration in the upper, because materialism starved an age that
was, he insisted, one of "craving credulity." He set himself to feed
ordinary men with extraordinary ideas. The ideas were never wholly
clear; he loved to juggle with thought as with language. But after
the counringhouse atmosphere of liberalism they had the freshness
of a sea wind.

The romanticism of Disraeli's outlook developed especially in the
field of imperial and foreign policy. Here he learned much from
Palmerston, and transmitted it to his party. The Liberals, on the
other hand, never fully outgrew their embarrassment at Palmer-
ston's saber-rattling; many of them remained sufficiently orthodox
to expect the eventual secession of the colonies, to oppose the ex-
tension of empire as unjust and extravagant, and to deplore a bel-
ligerent foreign policy. They were inherently isolationists, eager to
be quit of outside distractions in order to concentrate on domestic
progress, and their attitude was anathema to Disraeli. It derived
primarily from the mores of business, for which he had no use. It
envisaged the dissolution of empire; he dreamed of a paternalistic
state ruling the far corners of the globe for the good of the natives
and the glory of the Crown. It minimized the danger in foreign de-
velopments, whereas he insisted that imperial greatness depended
upon keeping the fingers of government continuously and firmly on
the pulse of world affairs.

He was too cautious to develop the economic implications of his
views. Just as the liberal attitude was inherently connected with
free trade, so his was with protection. If the centrifugal trend
within the empire were ever to be reversed, the obvious means
would be the re-creation of an overall tariff system for integrating
colonial and British economy. But Disraeli was trying to educate his
party to the need for progress, not for reaction, and he recognized
that free trade had become the core of the nation's economic faith.
He only hinted at the possibility of an imperial tariff system, and
then let the matter drop. A generation later his hint developed, with
the developing logic of imperialism, into a movement that split his
party and threatened its existence.

In the 1860's imperialism and foreign policy were only one focus
of national interest. The other was the rising demand for a demo-

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without any condition, began legislating in its own interest and leav-
ing administration largely to hired bureaucrats. Popular discontent
was directed against this bureaucracy and its employers, not against
the idea of a governing class per se. The remedy was to extend the
franchise until the House of Commons represented the whole nation,
The masses would then need a leadership they could not provide for
themselves; they would look for it not to the middle class, their natu-
ral enemies, but to the gentry and aristocracy, their natural friends.
"The wider the popular suffrage, the more powerful would be the
natural aristocracy," The dominance of the middle class would be
ended by an alliance of the top and the bottom.

This would not mean rule by the top, which Disraeli looked on as
the outmoded aristocratic principle. Rule by the bottom he feared,
and rule by the middle he detested. Then what was left? His answer
was that no one class should rule; each should have a voice, but nei-
ther its training nor its wealth nor its numbers justified predomi-
nance. The following sentences, from the Tory platform of reform
in 1867, are crucial in the development of the party: 'It is contrary
to the constitution of tVs realm to give to any one class or interest
a predominating power over the rest of the community /* "What we
desire to do is ... to prevent a preponderance of any class, and to
give a representation to the nation."

Against this background of balanced representation the Tory
function, as Disraeli conceived it, was to provide a leadership that
was both paternalistic and responsible at the polls. Its objective was
the broadening of civil rights. These he considered more important
to the people than their political rights an idea more familiar to-
day than to his contemporaries, and the key to his social program.
Because he did not believe that the masses were able to improve
themselves unaided, or that poverty resulted from individual incom-
petence, he felt that a measure of security must be provided by the
state. Under its aegis concessions might be made to certain groups
of the people, such as trade unions, in order to build a counter-
weight to the industrial bourgeoisie and maintain the balance of
classes. But the essential paternalism of the program would func-
tion through a governing class. "The proper leaders of the people
are the gentlemen of England. If they are not the leaders of the peo-
ple, I do not see why there should be gentlemen."

If gentlemanly leadership was to be responsible, every citizen had

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ity of man." The Tory believes in an elite composed of those with
the ability to lead. This is the governing class, which in conserva-
tive practice is commonly identified with the upper class; in con-
servative theory, however, its members should be recruited from all
levels, and the careers that by tradition have been largely reserved
for privilege the church, civil service, and armed forces should
be opened to talent from every class. But whether the membership
of the elite is determined by talent or by the old school tie, whether
it is responsible to a narrow or broad electorate, its function is to
govern.

On the political side, Tory democracy is opposed to the simple no-
tion that all questions can be settled by counting noses. This notion
ignores the rights of the minority and leads to government by and
for the lower classes because they are the most numerous; the result
may be Marxism but is not democracy. Restraint on the power of
the majority is widely accepted by both liberal and Tory as part of
the democratic process. The liberal would achieve restraint prima-
rily by emphasizing the rights of individuals and minorities as
against the state. The Tory would achieve it partly by leadership,
partly through the working of indirect representation. He denies, as
Disraeli did, that men can be represented only through periodic
elections; therefore he stresses the role of the House of Lords, the
Church, the monarchy, all of them unelected representatives of
some group or aspect of the nation. For the same reason he distrusts
the House of Commons. He is less likely than the liberal to associate
freedom with the legislature and tyranny with the executive, and is
far more ready to countenance strong and independent executive
action.

Modern Toryism is thus founded on certain principles. One is the
paternalism of an elite, as opposed to the materialism of plutocrats
and bureaucrats. Another is the concept of the state consecrated by
the Church and buttressed by the duties owed to it by all citizens.
A third is emphasis on the balance of power between groups and
classes, on indirect representation, and on the executive. These prin-
ciples were no discovery of Disraeli. He drew them from the long
tradition of his party and restated them in terms of his period. The
period was one of rapid change, in Europe from the age of Metter-
nich to that of Bismarck, overseas from the quiet of the Pax Britan-
nica to the cutthroat scramble of the powers for colonial empires, at

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The triumph of the North in 1865 was followed within six months
by the death of the Prime Minister. The great prop of oligarchy was
gone. Throughout his half -century on the political stage Palmerston
had remained the champion of freedom abroad, but he had grown
steadily more averse to change at home; his domestic policy was
that of an earlier liberalism, which his longevity and prestige main-
tained beyond its normal term. His death meant the beginning of a
new era. The question was not whether the system of 1832 would be
altered, but when, how, and by whom.

The prime ministership came briefly to another Liberal veteran,
Lord Russell, who was willing to concede a pallid measure of re-
form. But the real leadership of the party was in stronger hands.
William Ewart Gladstone had begun his parliamentary career as a
Tory in 1832, had seceded with the Peelites after 1846, and for the
past seven years had been Palmerston's Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer. He was already approaching sixty; but his major political
career was only beginning, and it was to last for thirty years. His
long background had bred into him certain orthodox liberal tenets,
particularly in regard to economics and foreign affairs, but in his
domestic creed he, like Disraeli, was far more radical than most of
his contemporaries. As Disraeli transformed the negative Toryism of
Castlereagh and Wellington into a positive program, so his great
opponent transformed the heritage of the Liberal Party into a body
of principles so dynamic that it continued to evolve during the
decades of his leadership, and after his retirement transformed the
party again.

Gladstonianism was thus a halfway point between the liberalism
of 1832 and that of 1906. But it was itself a moving point. Glad-
stone had a phenomenal vitality of mind, and his ideas changed at
an age when most men are clinging more and more tenaciously to
the status quo. For that very reason his liberalism cannot be pre-
cisely defined. Disraeli had essentially the same creed when he re-
tired in 1880 as he had had in the 1840*s. Gladstone developed his
under the spur of experience the demand now for a broader fran-
chise, now for social reform, now for a solution of the Irish prob-
lem. Most of these developments are part of a later era; here only
the first is relevant. When Gladstone advocated drastic electoral
change in the crisis of 1866-7, he set his party on a new and un-
mapped path.

Star of Empire

of the progressive elements in both. Disraeli's tactical skill had be-
guiled the Tory rank and file, in the excitement of debate, into en-
dorsing his principles. On the other side of the house Gladstone now
towered above all other Liberals; he had shaken himself free from
the shadow of Palmerston, and broken with the prophets of doom
who saw in reform "a perpetual whirl of change, alteration, innova-
tion, and revolution." 4 When the clamor of argument died away, a
new Toryism and a new Liberalism were taking form, and two
strong men faced each other.

The reform movement that precipitated this remoulding of par-
ties was itself a symptom of deeper change. The Industrial Revolu-
tion had created a powerful middle class, which had forced its way
into control of the oligarchy. But after 1846 its control was under-
mined by the revolution that had created it. As industrialization
spread, die workers 'were steadily increasing in numbers, impor-
tance, and political awareness; by the 1860's they were a real if in-
choate force, and the very fact that they were unorganized made
their enfranchisement seem reasonable. The days of oligarchy were
not yet over. It was years before the gentlemen of England, whether
Liberal or Tory, lost their control of the House of Commons, and
years more before they began to lose their hold on the Church, the
armed forces, the civil service. But the oligarchic base for an oli-
garchic government crumbled in 1867, when the ruling class became
responsible for its rule to a majority of the male citizens. That re-
sponsibility, in the new age that was opening, came to pervade ev-
ery aspect of politics.

* Robert Lowe, quoted by Sir John A, R. Marriott: England since Waterloo
(third edition, New York and London, 1919), p. 354.

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The sequence and interplay of these three themes give signifi-
cance to what would otherwise be a meaningless succession of min-
istries. After 1867 the Liberals and Conservatives, like the Whigs
and Tories after 1832, alternated in office, until in 1886 a large ele-
ment seceded from the Liberal Party as the Peelites had seceded
from the Tories forty years before. The Conservatives returned to
power and soon coalesced with the dissident Liberals, and this coal-
ition reigned supreme until Victoria's death. Then it disintegrated in
the face of a rising Liberal opposition, -which triumphed overwhelm-
ingly in 1906. The period thus falls into two main phases. Before the
schism of 1886 the two parties alternated; after 1886 the Conserva-
tives were predominant for twenty years and then collapsed. Why?
The explanation of this odd surface pattern lies in the attitude of
Liberals and Conservatives toward the issues that successively held
the public attention. Each party had its peculiar outlook and empha-
ses, and neither was equipped to handle domestic, Irish, and exter-
nal policy to the lasting satisfaction of the voters.

Until the last years of the century the Liberal Party -was domi-
nated by the personality and ideas of Gladstone. In the field of do-
mestic reform Gladstonianism was a far cry from the ideas of Cob-
den; the old faith in laissez faire was giving place to the faith that
progress could be legislated. In the field of foreign and imperial pol-
icy, on the other hand, the Liberals were traditionalists, so deeply
absorbed with internal affairs that they were slow to believe in out-
side dangers. They had been bred in tibe rationalistic optimism that
Britain's security had engendered in the mid-Victorian world, and
they clung to it despite the new factors that were undermining the
Pax Britannica. They believed that diplomacy could and should be
conducted by logic and mutual compromise rather than the threat of
force, and they considered the extension of empire as an illiberal
and immoral distraction from the battle against entrenched privi-
lege at home.

The Conservative attitude was wholly different. Privilege played
an integral part in Disraeli's scheme of things, and "his successors ac-
centuated his caution in tampering with it. Conservative domestic
policy was more restful than exciting, and after periods of drastic
Liberal housecleanings the voters inclined toward restfulness at
home. In foreign affairs, for contrast, the Conservatives offered am-
ple excitement* Their tradition went back to the eighteenth century,

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ing, and he could view the needs of the moment with an objectivity
untouched by Tory nostalgia for the past.

When he first became Prime Minister in 1868, one of the major
needs for reform was in education. Britain conformed in this respect
to a virtually universal pattern: an oligarchy fashions a school sys-
tem primarily to educate oligarchs, and a major extension of the
franchise requires a commensurate change in the schools if the new
voters are not to be illiterate prey for bosses and demagogues. This
lesson in democracy, taught eighty years before in the French Revo-
lution, the British now had occasion to learn. "It will be absolutely
necessary " one of Gladstone's colleagues had pointed out in 1867,
"that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their
letters.'* x

The immediate problem was the elementary schools. Less than
half the children of England received any formal teaching, and
much of it was grossly inadequate; there was no national system
even of governmental supervision. The evil was glaring, but specific
remedy was difficult. Granted that the state should supervise and,
where necessary, subsidize elementary education, what were the
limits of its interference? Much of the best teaching was being done
by the Anglican clergy, and the Church was up in arms at the sug-
gestion that religious instruction should be undenominational or
omitted entirely. Many Liberals were equally incensed at the sug-
gestion that attendance should be compulsory; parents of a working-
class family, they argued, had the right to decide whether their
child should be learning or earning because the decision affected
the family's income. Laissez faire was a tenacious doctrine.

The Education Act of 1870 was a compromise, but it opened the
way to future progress. It divided the country into school districts,
gave the government supervision of existing schools, and empow-
ered it to create new ones as needed under elective local boards; the
questions of religious instruction and attendance were left largely to
these boards. Within a decade all districts were provided with
boards, and school attendance was made compulsory; soon after-
ward the state assumed the entire financial burden. Gladstone's orig-
inal measure led rapidly to an effective national system, and Brit-
ain's new masters began to be literate.

* Robert Lowe in Hansard: Parliamentary Debates, CLXXXVHI, 1549. The
quotation is edited and improved by Marriott: England since Waterloo, p. 397.

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changes begun by their predecessors in the fields of education, the
judiciary, and labor relations, and accelerated state intervention in
other fields; Disraeli showed that the new Toryism, on its domestic
side, was not a barren program. But his major achievement was far
too subtle for the statute book. He was able to implement his con-
cept of monarchy, and in six years he did more than any man in
Victoria's reign to raise the prestige of the Crown.

After the death of her adored husband, Prince Albert, the Queen
had retired more and more from the public eye. She had felt that
her strength was insufficient for both business and ceremonial, and
had sacrificed the second to the first. By the early 1870's the people
were losing patience; the barometer of her popularity was danger-
ously low, and talk of republicanism was in the air. Gladstone was
alarmed, and remonstrated with the Queen to little effect. She was
as obstinate as her grandfather; remonstrance could not move her.

Disraeli used finesse. He remarked that he treated her as a
woman, where Gladstone never learned that she was more than a
department of government. But his witticism is misleading: he. ex-
alted her as a department while he flattered her as a woman. He had
preached the importance of the sovereign's advisory role. He now
consulted the Queen assiduously and deferred when possible to her
prejudices; she rewarded him with a confidence and affection she
had not given to any prime minister in a generation. Delicately but
firmly he led her back to the center of the stage, to the spotlight and
the cheering, and in 1876 he had her proclaimed Empress of India.
She found her return agreeable, and it was unquestionably popular.
The transition from oligarchy to democracy at home and from quiet
to perennial crisis abroad was bewildering to the nation, which
craved a symbol of continuity. Disraeli sensed the craving, and Vic-
toria satisfied it. The more the lonely old woman threw herself into
her role, the stronger her throne became. Her character and longev-
ity, and the conditions of the times, were the important factors in
this process, but it was helped at a critical moment by Disraeli's
courtliness.

In 1880 Gladstone returned to office, to the Queen's regret, and
Disraeli died before his wit could play upon the troubles of the Lib-
erals. For they were soon engulfed in troubles from South Africa to
Ireland, and as a consequence their domestic policy was far less vig-
orous than it had been a decade before. Their only legislation of

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United States. They were the material of the Fenian Brotherhood, a
secret organization with members in Britain, Ireland, and the United
States, but largely directed and almost wholly financed from Amer-
ica. Its purpose was to force Great Britain to grant Irish independ-
ence, and its method was any form of outrage that might be ef-
fective.

The United States was a promising center for Fenian activity.
During the Civil War Northern opinion had been exasperated by
the widespread sympathy for the Confederate cause among the Brit-
ish ruling class, and infuriated by specific actions of the British gov-
ernment. When the Union triumph left the United States, for the
moment, one of the strongest military powers in the world, Ameri-
can imperialist ambitions and anti-British rancor were an explosive
combination. The best hope of the Fenians was to precipitate an
Anglo-American war, and in 1866 they tried to touch it off by at-
tacking Canada. The United States government failed to prevent the
attack, but did nothing to support it; American public opinion did
not catch fire, and the "invasion" petered out ignomioiously.

The Fenians then transferred their attention to England. They
opened a new phase of propaganda by a series of outrages in Eng-
land that brought the Irish question again to the fore. Gladstone, in
particular, concluded that only a broad and enlightened settlement
could kill Fenianism at its roots; in 1868 he began to struggle with
the problem, and he continued for the thirty years left him. Uproot-
ing the Irish upas tree became tie dominant interest of his life. But
the roots were too deep for him. He only cut off branches, and from
their stumps the poison went on flowing.

His first attack was ecclesiastical. In 1869 the Anglican Church in
Ireland was disestablished and disendowed, and the island was at
last freed from the incubus fastened upon it in the sixteenth cen-
tury. But disestablishment was by now little more than a gesture.
The basic question, as Gladstone realized, was the land. Famine and
depopulation had broken the traditional web between landlords and
tenants; the peasants were exposed, as in the days of Cromwell, to
the rutblessness of absentee landlords, and the tenant rights sanc-
tioned by Irish custom were unknown to British law. Free trade in
land was as much to the benefit of the capitalist as free trade in la-
bor, but the cost in Ireland was hatred and perennial murder.

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was suppressed and its leaders imprisoned. Neither side of this pol-
icy succeded. Agrarian conditions largely vitiated the operation of
the land courts, and violence continued to spread.

The logic of Home Rule, although it was still unpalatable to the
British public, appealed increasingly to men of good will as the Lib-
eral policy proved unworkable. Unless the struggle between repres-
sion and revolt were to go on endlessly, why not turn over to the
Irish the onus of settling their difficulties? Home Rule was a more
moderate aim than the extremists* goal of independence, and for
Britain it was certainly the lesser evil. Behind the Home Rulers in
the House of Commons stood the revolutionaries in Ireland, ready
to seize the lead if moderation failed.

The Home Rule movement, like the demand for Catholic eman-
cipation a half-century before, was the political crystallization of a
discontent generated primarily by economic forces. It was also dom-
inated by one man, comparable in power with O'Connell. Charles
Stewart Parnell was English on his father's side, a landlord and a
Protestant; but from his American mother he had inherited a hatred
of all things British. He had an inflexible will and a mind of ice;
Home Rule was his passion, and he was contemptuous of whatever
man or institution stood in his way. He opposed violence as a blun-
der more than as a crime; his scruples were no nicer than those of
the Fenians, but he believed that British public opinion could be
more affected by legitimate if ruthless parliamentary sabotage
than by bombings and bullets. Before long the accidents of politics
raised him to a key position in the House of Commons, from which
he had a chance to paralyze the very functioning of the state.

In 1880 he assumed the leadership of the Home Rule group in the
House, and soon reduced it to an obedience that a drill sergeant
might have envied. He then embarked on his campaign. Its strategy
was simple: to make the parliamentary system ridiculous and un-
workable, so that the British would be glad to be rid of the Irish in
order to have government again. His opportunity lay in the charac-
ter of the House. For all its change of personnel, it still retained
much of its eighteenth-century tone. The press of business had not
yet greatly curtailed free debate; the atmosphere was leisured and
gentlemanly, and the members got through their work by virtue
more of tacit agreement than of the complicated rules. Parnell was no
party to the agreement, and he knew the rules. The Irish used every

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led him deeper into the morass. His ideas did not grow stiff with age
but could always be remolded by new evidence, and to his rational
mind the evidence that ParnelTs answer was the right one eventu-
ally outweighed all the tactics of the Home Rulers, the criminality of
the terrorists, and the passions aroused in the British public. The
evidence was partly the existing situation, partly the trials and er-
rors of British policy in the previous two decades. Gladstone be-
came convinced, and his conviction, like Peel's before him, was
stronger than considerations of self or party. In 1886, at the age of
seventy-seven, he began the greatest battle of his career.

The proposal to repeal the Act of Union split the Liberal Party, as
forty years earlier the proposal to repeal the corn laws had split the
Tories. The adhesion of Paraell was more than counterbalanced by
the secession of some of Gladstone's most influential colleagues, and
after bitter debate the first Home Rule Bill was rejected in the
Commons. The Prime Minister appealed to the country in the sec-
ond general election within nine months. He was overwhelmingly
defeated, and resigned. Although he carried on the fight for another
eight years, he fought against hopeless odds. The backbone of his
party -was broken, and even his magic was powerless to mend it.

The break was not really caused by the issue of how Ireland
should be governed, any more thjm the Tory break in 1846 had been
caused by the issue of a grain tariff. Home Rule raised basic ques-
tions, which explain the acrimony of the struggle for the next forty
years. One was a question of principle. Gladstone proposed a uni-
tary solution for the problem of a divided Ireland, and the solution
was anathema to Ulster. For two centuries, with momentary excep-
tions, the instinct of the northern Irish had led them to oppose any
move in that direction. Their social and economic ties with Britain
were closer than those of the rest of the island, but the crux of the
matter was political: their liberties were better secured by a parlia-
ment at Westminster than they could be by one at Dublin, particu-
larly after the Catholic gentry and peasantry of the south had been
enfranchised. Gladstone, according to his opponents, advocated the
illiberal coercion of a minority, and of one that had remained loyal
and law-abiding while the southern Irish were proving, by terrorism
and sabotage, their unfitness for self-government. This view pre-
vailed in Britain.

It did not prevail merely because of its logic. Home Rule also

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was more than these conservatives could swallow. They seceded in
company with the radicals, whose domestic program shocked them,
and the strange assortment of rebels took the label of Liberal Union-
ists. They were Liberal only in origin, and they gradually aban-
doned the adjective. As Unionists their destination was clear. They
could no more resist the pull of the Conservatives than the Peelites,
as free-traders, had been able to resist that of the Liberals. By 1895
they completed their alliance with the Tories. Chamberlain held of-
fice in Salisbury's cabinet while his followers joined hands with radi-
cal Tories, the heirs of Disraeli, in the cause of democratic reform.
They could not move the old guard; it remained in power, and after
1902 the sterility of its domestic program brought the coalition to
disaster.

Gladstone's party followed a different road. He himself retained
for a time his extraordinary hold on the voters, but his political vi-
tality was narrowed to the one issue of Home Rule. When the elec-
torate tired of this issue in the 1890's, the Liberals and their Irish
allies went into the wilderness together. There Liberalism trans-
formed itself and gained strength for a triumphant return in 1906.
It returned as it had gone, committed to the Irish, and the commit-
ment eventually brought civil war before it was redeemed.

The Irish crisis of 1886 thus precipitated a complete realignment
in British politics. The balance of parties that had endured for
twenty years was upset for another twenty. The Conservatives, with
their emphasis on imperialism, were joined by the most nationalistic
of the Liberals, and the allies guided the country through a phase of
belligerent expansion. Gladstonianism was destroyed within a dec-
ade, but the Liberal Party survived to raise the Irish question again
in the twentieth century. These were the consequences implicit in
Gladstone's defeat.

IV The New Europe

AFTER 1868 the fluctuating judgment of the electorate was increas-
ingly affected by issues of foreign and imperial policy. These issues
played a relatively minor part in Gladstone's first and greatest min-
istry. They dominated the scene during Disraeli's term and helped
to defeat him in 1880. Thereafter they harassed Gladstone, drove
him in one case far from his principles, and contributed almost as

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the Balkans. As its interest there increased, so did the prospect of
friction with Russia. During the Franco-Prussian War the Czar had
denounced the Treaty of Paris and begun to remilitarize the Black
Sea. He was obviously considering another move in the Near East,
where Austria was now replacing France in the old triangular bal-
ance of power. Of the three participants, Britain alone had static
interests; both Austria and Russia wished to expand. If Germany
held aloof, Britain might be able to maintain an uneasy equilibrium
by her old methods. But if Germany aligned herself with Austria or
with Russia, those methods would no longer serve. Britain would
then, sooner or later, have to revise her whole traditional policy in
the eastern Mediterranean.

France, like Austria, was set on a new path by German unifica-
tion. The dream of re-establishing her hegemony in Europe had led
France to the most humiliating defeat of her history. She never for-
got or forgave the German annexation of Alsace and part of Lor-
raine, and the very existence of the German Empire reduced her to
a subordinate position in Europe. She accepted what she could not
redress, but she was impelled to recover her lost pride by gains else-
where. As Austria turned to the Balkans, she turned to Africa. From
her foothold in Algeria she began to expand to the south and south-
east toward the Sudan and the Belgian Congo. Here was the heart
of her empire; its outworks stretched through Indo-China into the
islands of the Pacific. Out of defeat she fashioned for herself, within
a quarter-century, an imperial position second only to Britain's.

This renascence was of increasing concern to the British Foreign
Office. Britain had never lost her distrust of France, and in the late
nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, distrust was heated by fric-
tion overseas. French designs in the Far East stimulated British ex-
pansion and precipitated crises, but the crux of rivalry was the Nile
valley; there the two powers struggled for influence, first in Egypt
and then in the Sudan, until they -were on the verge of war. As
France turned overseas, she reverted for a time to her former role
of Britain's implacable enemy.

The German Empire itself, for all its indirect influence on Brit-
ain's position, did not begin to be focal in her diplomacy for the
better part of a generation. Bismarck's aim was peace, so that the
empire might cohere and develop its strength; for the two decades
of his chancellorship he maintained a Pax Germanica, while Ger-

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for economic reasons, of a revolution in which the masses would
sweep everything before them. The followers of Darwin were pro-
claiming the law of the jungle, of survival through brute strength
guided by intelligence, and so were purporting to give the sanc-
tion of science to the idea that force, in an amoral world, was the
major criterion of fitness. The spirit of Machiavelli was suddenly ap-
pearing in many guises, in the arguments of patriots, of Marxian de-
terminists, of the popularizers of evolution. It was challenging the
eighteenth-century values out of which liberalism had grown, and
the liberal faith was being forced onto the defensive.

The new nationalism, because of its profound emotional appeal,
was the most powerful force in this warfare of ideas. It drove the
liberal back, through his outworks of qualifying logic and compro-
mise, to the final defenses of his Christianity and his rationalism. As
a Christian he could not admit that his supreme duty was to obey
the state, or he would render his soul unto Caesar and violate the
first commandment both of Moses and of Christ. As a rationalist he
could not admit the divinity of the nation-state, with its priesthood
of bureaucrats and generals and its sacrament of war, or he would
violate his faith in reason. For the new religion was in essence irra-
tional. It implied that the nation was an entity with transcendant
virtue, which its human components served by obeying rather than
by thinking for themselves. It taught that progress was not toward
an international Utopia but toward the apotheosis of national power,
and that the only natural law was the jungle law; it admitted no
optimism beyond the hope of collective survival, and no logic but
force. This was a creed as alien to eighteenth-century philosophy as
to the Sermon on the Mount.

British liberals were slow to take alarm. The nationalism of John
Bull was for the most part in the bones, where it seemed proof
against the new virus. To a generation bred in the Whig tradition
the state was an object of distrust more than of worship, and the
concept of organized power made little sense: Britain's economic
power could not be organized in an era of free trade, and the exer-
cise of her sea power was rarely conspicuous enough to impinge on
the public consciousness. German ideas seemed to be as irrelevant
as they were strange.

In fact, however, those ideas in domestic dress -were soon shaking
the Victorians* complacency. Many British intellectuals, from Car-

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force became a drop in the great bucket of European manpower,
and the accelerated speed of war suggested that the drop might fall
too late to have any effect. Far more important, the navy might not
have time to make its pressure felt; no exercise of sea power could
have saved Austria in 1866 or France in 1870. Britain, in short, could
no longer improvise her intervention on the Continent. Either she
would plan it far in advance, which presupposed an ally, or she
would become a helpless spectator. 'The first alternative was con-
trary to her whole isolationist tradition. But the second meant aban-
doning her even more basic tradition of intervening to protect such
key areas as the Low Countries or to oppose a power seeking the
mastery of Europe. Sooner or later she would have to choose be-
tween her isolation and her security.

Meanwhile the spread of the new nationalism, in conjunction
with industrialism, was changing the economic order. Britain no
longer monopolized the Industrial Revolution; her capital, exported
in search of a market, bad helped to finance foreign manufactures,
and their rivalry was being felt. Her gospel of free trade, on the
other hand, had not been successfully exported. It was incompatible
with the concept of the state as organized power; it was anathema
to foreign industrialists, who wished to capture their own markets;
its essential internationalism, above all, ran counter to the new spirit
of national self-sufficiency. Here again the lead in Europe was
taken by Germany, whose tariff walls rose with the rise of her man-
ufactures* The other new giant of industry, the United States, was
equally committed to protection, and the rest of the industrial world
followed suit. The dominions raised tariffs even against the mother
country, and Britain was left to practice her principles virtually
alone.

The practice grew increasingly difficult. The British industrial
plant -was the oldest in the world; it represented an enormous in-
vestment, which its directors were understandably slow to sacrifice
for experiments with new tools and techniques. The individualistic
tradition was still strong, and manufacturers were almost as much
averse to the dominance of a trust or cartel as to the interference of
the state. Their hold on outside markets was weakening, however,
with the rise of tariffs and competition, and even their domestic
market was no longer secure. By the 1880's some of them began to
agitate for what they called fair trade, a return to limited protection

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leave the Irish problem hanging fire and plunge into the colonial
scramble in Africa. Thereafter they never regained the aloofness
that had been their pride since 1815.

The high noon of British supremacy had passed. In the political
sphere it had depended on the balance of power established at Vi-
enna, a balance of five great states with limited objectives; now Aus-
tria and France were turning to new paths, and behind them, too
close for comfort, was the dynamic and incalculable German Em-
pire. In the sphere of ideas Britain had been the cynosure of pro-
gressives throughout the world; now her constitutional and eco-
nomic principles were being widely discarded for the worship of
the nation-state. In the military and industrial spheres she was still
powerful, but it was the power of a muscular middle age. In the im-
perial sphere she was exposed to relentless competition for the first
time since the days of Chatham. These forces of change gradually
remolded her foreign policy. It grew harder, more aggressive, as
her self-assurance declined. After 1886 she began a militant expan-
sion, and her principal motive was fear.

V The Renascence of Imperialism

THE HARDENING of mood set in long before. Its progress was re-
flected in the three successive ministries of the years 1868-86, and
can be seen from a glance at the external problems and policies of
each. The contrast, in this respect, between the opening of Glad-
stone's first term and the dose of his second is a measure of the
transition in public attitude.

Between 1868 and 1874 Gladstone had his one opportunity to han-
dle foreign and imperial affairs by the principles on which he had
been bred. No great crises or insoluble conflicts of interest appeared,
and the government could afford to follow the liberal tradition.
When the Franco-Prussian War jeopardized the independence of
Belgium, Britain safeguarded her protg6 by guarantees from both
belligerents. When Russia menaced Afghanistan, she in turn was
stopped by diplomacy; her repudiation of the Treaty of Paris had
to be either fought or accepted, and it was accepted at an interna-
tional conference. Negotiations, in short, replaced Palmerstonian
bluster.

The most fruitful negotiation was with the United States. The

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soon go their ways; the New Zealand affair suggested that they had
no such intention, and even Liberals recoiled from forcing them.
Anti-imperialism began to wane, and the British welcomed all evi-
dences of colonial loyalty. Their increasing anxiety about their own
position in the world reawoke their interest in their dominions.

The spokesman of the new attitude was Disraeli. After the second
Reform Bill he became the champion of imperialism against what
he portrayed as the supineness of the Liberals, and his victory at
the polls in 1874 changed the tone of British policy. He intervened
in Egypt and South Africa, but in both areas his policy can best be
considered in connection with Gladstone's later amendment of it.
The focus of Disraeli's attention, and the main theme of his minis-
try, was the defense of the empire against Russia. Here his maneu-
vers brought Britain to the thin edge of war, and then achieved a
diplomatic triumph as spectacular as it was ephemeral.

The revived Russian interest in the straits, shown by the repudia-
tion of the Treaty of Paris, came just when the opening of the Suez
Canal had made the Mediterranean into one of Britain's main arter-
ies of empire. The Turkish barrier across the straits had become pro-
portionately more valuable to her, and Disraeli was determined to
defend it. In 1875 a Balkan uprising against the Turks provoked
them to atrocities that nauseated Europe. Gladstone demanded that
they be expelled from the Continent, and his view was gaining
ground with the British public when Russia intervened alone. Her
armies advanced to the gates of Constantinople, where in the spring
of 1878 she dictated the Treaty of San Stefano. By it the Sultan rec-
ognized the complete or virtual independence of Serbia, Montene-
gro, Rumania, and Bulgaria, and a large measure of autonomy for
Bosnia and Herzegovina. He signed away most of his empire in Eu-
rope; the Balkan question was apparently settled by Russian fiat.

This Disraeli refused to accept, ostensibly because the Treaty of
Paris precluded a unilateral settlement and actually because he
feared that the states recognized at San Stefano would give Russia
access to the straits. The wisdom of Ids position was questionable.
He ignored the possibility that the Balkan peoples who had no de-
sire to be freed from the Sultan in order to become puppets of the
Czar would constitute as effective buffers against Russia as the
decrepit Ottoman Empire. The morality of his position was also
questionable, because he sought to regain for the Turks the prov-

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leans and Near East, the Drang nach Osten of later years. In 1914 the
forces loosed by this drive brought on a general war.

The momentous shift from neutrality to alignment with Austria
was forced on Bismarck by the nature of his diplomatic problem. In
order to prevent France from finding an ally for her war of revenge
he had established close relations with both Russia and Austria-
Hungary. But in 1878 they were pulling apart, and he could not stay
with both. He chose Austria. In 1879 he concluded with her a de-
fensive alliance that grew steadily more important over the next
thirty-five years until it drew the allies into war. Russia was rebuffed
and isolated. Although in the 1880's she came to terms for a time
with the Austro-German combine, the solidarity of the three powers
had been shattered by the Balkan question.

For the moment the congress had achieved the peace of which
Disraeli boasted. If the peace was fragile, on the surface it was a
triumph for British diplomacy. Disraeli basked in the limelight of
victory, and even Bismarck applauded. "The old Jew/' was his com-
ment, "there's a man for youl" This praise from St. Hubert was well
merited. Disraeli was the peer of the Iron Chancellor in subtle, ruth-
less patriotism, and peace with honor was his masterpiece*

Gladstone denied that it was honorable. For him the claims of na-
tional interest and strategic security were subordinate to those of
morality and justice, a view that seemed quixotic even to leaders of
his own party. But Disraeli's policy angered him, and his anger was
still a power in the land. He set out to rouse the British conscience.
At the start of this Midlothian campaign he had against him a large
majority of Parliament and public and an almost unanimous press;
within two years he talked the government out of office. Disraeli
helped him by embarking on dangerous adventures in South Africa
and Afghanistan, which brought home to the voter the price of the
strong line. But the essential reason why the campaign succeeded
-was the voter's moral sense. The amorality of power politics had not
yet bled white the ideals of liberalism. When they were thundered
from Sinai by the last great liberal, they were still strong enough to
change national policy.

If Gladstone's victory showed the strength of liberalism at the
polls> his conduct in office showed its weakness in the world of the
1880*8. To denounce Disraelf s strong line as dishonorable and dan-
gerous was one thing; to find an alternative line that would be nei-

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They were equally obvious on the Quai d'Orsay. Ever since the
days of the Directory France had had a particular interest in
Egypt, and her rising imperialism quickened it. A French company
had built the canal, French capital had partially financed it, and
French influence at Cairo was strong. If intervention proved neces-
sary, French patriots were insistent that Britain should not act
alone.

Events moved rapidly. In 1875 Ismail sold to the British govern-
ment his holding of almost half the shares in the Suez Canal Com-
pany. In the following year his finances were subjected to the au-
thority of an international commission, in which Britain and France
were soon predominant. When he intrigued against this dual con-
trol, the Sultan was induced to depose him in favor of his son. The
Egyptians themselves then took a hand. Their nationalism was
aroused by Turkish and European interference, and the new econo-
mics fell with particular weight on the army. A revolutionary move-
ment began to develop under a Colonel Arabi. The dual control,
created to prevent anarchy, was instead precipitating it.

This was the situation when Gladstone took office. His policy
over the next five years is the classic illustration of how empire may
be acquired by inadvertence. He wished to limit Britain's responsi-
bilities, and he greatly extended them; the cry of "Egypt for the
Egyptians!" roused his sympathies, and he proceeded to occupy
Egypt. If he had not done so, the Egyptians would have misgov-
erned themselves into chaos while the British bondholders howled
for his blood; if the French had then moved in, his cabinet could
not have survived the storm. With all his high moral sense he was in
the clutch of circumstance, and it led him down an extraordinary
path.

Early in 1882 the one hope of avoiding unilateral action disap-
peared, when a political upset in France brought to power a cabinet
as averse to acting as Gladstone would have liked to be. Some action
was imperative: Arabi, now the real ruler, was bringing Egypt to a
state where the lives of all Europeans were in jeopardy. An Anglo-
French naval demonstration off Alexandria only stimulated rioting
and massacre, and the French squadron withdrew. The British
thereupon landed troops to re-establish the Khedive's authority, as
Gladstone proclaimed to Europe, and then depart The idea was
naive. Arabf s army was promptly destroyed in battle, and with it

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Retreat was ordered, and the Sudan was turned over to the depre-
dations of the Mahdi.

So ended one of the sorriest chapters in British imperialism. Its
effect at home was to increase the bitterness against Gladstone
within and without his party, and so to contribute to the Liberal
debacle. Its effect on the Egyptian problem was more fundamental.
Only an artificial frontier divides Egypt from the Sudan, and the
Egyptian army was demoralized. While the Sudan remained in an-
archy, spawning fanatical tribesmen, Egypt could be protected
against their incursions only by British forces. Gladstone had called
a halt at an illogical point: as Suez was insecure without Egypt, so
Egypt was insecure without the upper Nile. Until the British re-
peated the march to Khartum and avenged Gordon, they had to re-
main in Egypt.

By 1886 Britain had improved her strategic position in the Near
East at the cost of diplomatic isolation. Disraeli's intervention in
the Balkans had ensured Russian hostility, and Gladstone's interven-
tion on tne Nile had ensured French. For France felt that she had
been cheated out of Egypt, and she looked to the Sudan for recom-
pense as soon as the Egyptians and British had abandoned it. She
pushed her empire eastward across the Sahara toward the White
Nile; if she could reach the river, she might turn the flank of the
British position and even make it untenable. Sooner or later this am-
bition was bound to precipitate an Anglo-French crisis on the upper
Nile.

Meanwhile another crisis was preparing in South Africa. There
again Disraeli took the first step, by abruptly ending the policy of
laissez faire toward the Boers that had prevailed since the 1850's.
His primary reason was the native problem, and in particular the
Zulus. This formidable tribe, living between Natal and the Boer re-
publics, -was organized into a rudimentary army, and the scattered
white settlers were no match for it; if the Boers stirred up the hor-
net's nest in Zululand, Natal and even Gape Colony would feel the
consequences. The solution that appealed to London was to feder-
ate the Boer states with the British colonies, so as to make possible
a joint policy and joint defense, and the first step was to overcome
the prickly independence of the Transvaal Boers.

The time seemed ripe. The Transvaal government existed only in
name; its treasury was empty, its citizens did as they pleased, and

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Transvaal are examples in point. One left the Sudanese to a decade
of horror under the scourge of the Mahdi and his successor, and
opened the way for the most serious Anglo-French crisis since 1815.
The other encouraged the Boers to believe that they could, if nec-
essary, defy the strength of the British Empire. The belief was nat-
ural, but dangerous for them and for Britain.

By 1886 the principles of the older liberalism, in summary, were
no more valid for external policy than for internal. Gladstone modi-
fied them far more throughly in dealing with domestic and Irish
problems than in dealing with the outside world, and his diplomacy
grew progressively less successful. During his first ministry no ma-
jor crises arose. Then came the Tory interlude, with trouble in the
Balkans and the beginnings of trouble in Africa. In his second min-
istry these African problems plagued him, and his failure to solve
them cannot be fully explained by his mounting absorption with
Ireland. The world of the 1880*s was alien to him. Its stock of good
will seemed to be exhausted; he confronted the hostility of Russia
and France, the scheming of Bismarck, a cauldron of intrigue at
Cairo, pugnacity in the Transvaal. He was not made to be a power
politician, and power was the ascendant value.

The value was recognized by Tories and many Liberals. The
Palmerstonian concept of the strong line, which Disraeli had
adapted to a new age, was gaining ground despite the temporary
reverse of a Midlothian campaign. Largely because of Gladstone's
towering prestige, the concept did not capture the Liberals while
they held together. When their imperialist members seceded to the
Tories and the resultant coalition came to power, the spirit of Dis-
raeli came with it The Liberal schism, therefore, was as much a
turning point in foreign as in domestic policy. After 1886 Britain
shook off her complacence. She remained isolated but grew increas-
ingly defiant, until by the turn of the century she discovered that
the strong line is the shortest distance from tranquillity to crisis.

VI Conquest in Africa

IN the decade after 1886 the alliance of Liberal and Tory imperial-
ists was cemented by the Irish question. In 1892, after ParnelTs
death, Gladstone returned to office with a bare and flimsy majority
for Home Rule. The old man was indomitable. With all his former

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lation in a reign of terror. Egyptian finances had been so strength-
ened that they could now bear the costs of reconquest, and the
Khedive's army had been molded into an effective force by its Brit-
ish commander, Sir Herbert Kitchener. The public at home was in
a mood to revenge Gordon by finishing his work. For all these rea-
sons Kitchener was ordered into the Sudan. In two years he broke
the tribesmen's resistance and extended Anglo-Egyptian authority
southward to Khartum. He had no more than gained the capital in
1898 when he heard that the French had reached the White Nile
far to the south, at the village of Fashoda. This move threatened the
whole strategic purpose of his advance. He was ordered to Fashoda,
and annexed the whole area, while the French remained as witness
to their prior claim. The crisis was transferred to London and Paris.

France was willing to withdraw from Fashoda only at a price.
Her purpose was to force the simultaneous negotiation of all the
outstanding differences between the two empires, and in particular
to raise again the dormant Egyptian question; she would then be in
a position to trade her claims on the Nile for substantial conces-
sions elsewhere. Britain, on the contrary, intended to meet each dif-
ference separately, with a minimum of concession, and at all costs
to keep Egypt out of the discussion. She was in a fighting rather
than a bargaining mood.

Throughout the autumn of 1898 the tension mounted, and for a
time war seemed inevitable. But the French were in the throes of a
domestic scandal, their African armies were in danger of being cut
off from France by the Royal Navy, and the Sudan, now that it had
failed to force Britain to terms, was not sufficiently important to
them to justify a war. For all these reasons the French government
gave way. It recalled the expedition, and in the spring of 1899 it
acknowledged British control of the entire area. This was uncondi-
tional surrender.

Britain was supremely lucky in the timing. Six months later the
simmering kettle in South Africa boiled over at last, and the Boers
started to drive the British into the sea. If this attack had coincided
with the Fashoda crisis, instead of following it, Britain could
scarcely have defied the French in the north while defending herself
against the Boers in the south. As it was she secured the Nile in the
nick of time by sheer intransigence, and then provoked the Boers by
the same intransigence. They had deeper grievances than the

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only the advance guard of a new world knocking at the gate, and
the politics of Johannesburg were inseparable from those of Cape-
town and London.

The government of the South African Republic was headed by a
man who personified Boer conservatism. Paul Kruger came straight
out of the seventeenth century; his Calvinism, rooted in the Old
Testament, equipped him for leadership in the last community of
Puritans. Great Britain he detested. As a boy he had joined in the
Great Trek, and as a man he had played a leading part in the revolt
of 1880-1; he hoped eventually to make all South Africa Dutch.
When he was elected president of the infant republic in 1883, the
hope was visionary. But the opening of the Rand changed the
whole prospect.

Kruger disliked the Uitlanders on many grounds. They were pre-
ponderantly British, and they threatened to be the means of reas-
serting British influence. Before long they were sure to demand the
suffrage, which he could not give them without undermining his
own authority. They represented modernity at its worst, and were
corrupting the manners and morals of the young generation of
Boers; Johannesburg was defined as "Monte Carlo superimposed
upon Sodom and Gommorrah." 2 But Kruger did not discourage
their immigration, for they had one cardinal virtue: they paid taxes.
For the first time in Boer history the government had sufficient
funds to be effective; much as the President feared the newcomers,
he was anxious to gather and husband their golden eggs. Gold was
the means by which he intended to maintain his political suprem-
acy and increase his military power against the day of reckoning.

The result for the Uitlanders was taxation without representation.
They financed the state, and received almost nothing from it except
an increasingly dictatorial administration; they had few political
rights even in the towns they had created. The flotsam and jetsam of
the mining camps, transients who came only to make a quick for-
tune and leave again, were poor material for citizenship. But as the
years passed and conditions became stabilized, a growing propor-
tion of the immigrants settled into respectability, and their demand
for representation became more persuasive. Kruger gave only one
answer: he had not asked them to come and did not ask them to

2 Quoted by Elie Halevy: A History of the English People: Epilogue [1895-
19151 (2 vols., London, 1929-34), I, 75, note 1.

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reached Kruger's capital at Pretoria; although this was a tenuous
link with the outside world, it strengthened the President's means of
resistance. The pressure of encirclement made him not more amena-
ble, but less. He refused economic co-operation with British Africa,
and his attitude toward the Uitlanders stiffened. He was antagoniz-
ing both the management of the great mining companies and their
employees. The Rand was ready to explode.

Rhodes did not want a spontaneous explosion, with its unpredict-
able timing and results; he was used to controlling events. When he
found that some of the Uitlanders were plotting a rebellion, he pre-
pared to aid them with a force of Company troops under the com-
jnand of his friend and agent, Dr. Jameson. At the end of 1895 Jame-
son tired of waiting and invaded the Transvaal, where he was
promptly captured by the Boers. Years of planning, of encirclement
and pressure, had culminated in a fiasco.

It ended the era of Rhodes. He resigned as Prime Minister and
went into retirement. The Jameson Raid destroyed his scheme for
forcing the republics into co-operation, and it reawoke the old an-
tipathies. The large Boer population of Cape Colony grew restive at
the threat to their compatriots, and many began to think seriously
about Kruger's dream of Dutch ascendancy. He had been criticized
even by the Transvaal Boers, but the raid rallied them behind him.
The Orange Free State also fell into line, and Kruger stood out as
the leader of his whole scattered people against British aggression.

He seized his opportunity to increase the purchases of arms and
ammunition. Public opinion in Europe was shocked by the raid, and
the German Kaiser congratulated the republic on handling the cri-
sis "without appealing to the help of friendly powers." This thinly
veiled hint infuriated the British, and encouraged the belief at Pre-
toria that the time had come to establish the Dutch claim to South
Africa in the teeth of the British Empire. Rhodes had had his day;
now Kruger had his.

But he was dealing with an opponent even more dangerous than
Rhodes. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, was also an
avid imperialist, and in African policy his influence in the cabinet
outweighed that of the aging and cautious Salisbury. The Uitlanders
were taken more and more openly under the wing of the British
government. Negotiations dragged on while the Boers completed
their armaments and the British completed their quarrel with

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nexation of invaded British territory proclaimed their own imperial-
ism. Britain was appalled at her defeats, and lost her light-hearted
jingoism. But she had only begun to fight. Troops poured in from
the mother country and the dominions as well. The Boers had chal-
lenged the community of British peoples, and for the first time the
response came from all over the world; thousands of volunteers from
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand put the quietus on the old be-
lief that the empire was dissolving.

When the British counteroffensive began, its issue was never in
doubt. By the autumn of 1900 the Boers* field armies were dis-
persed and their principal cities occupied, Kruger was in exile, and
the republics were annexed. The struggle seemed over, but in fact
its worst phase was beginning. The Boers, like the British in their
own dark hours, lacked the imagination to know that they were
beaten. For a year and a half they "waged a gallant, brilliant, and
essentially hopeless guerrilla war against the occupation forces. Al-
though the British increased their army to 200,000 men, its helpless-
ness made it the laughingstock of Europe until Kitchener became
commander in chief. He attacked the problem with methodical ef-
ficiency. B.ailroads were guarded by blockhouses, nearby farm
buildings destroyed and the inhabitants put into concentration
camps, and the guerrillas driven across the veldt like game and
herded against barbed-wire entanglements. Meanwhile fever was
taking heavy toll among the troops and in the concentration camps;
the deaths of thousands of women and children prisoners raised a
storm in the House of Commons. This was a new kind of war, shorn
of glamour, and it completed the disillusionment of the British
public.

In the spring of 1902 the government opened negotiations with
the remaining Boer leaders, and both sides negotiated in a new
spirit. Each had learned to respect the other, and respect bred the
beginnings of confidence. This paradoxical result of battle appeared
in the ensuing settlement. By the Treaty of Vereeniging the repub-
lics 'were annexed to the empire with the promise of future self-
government; they retained their language in schools and courts, the
Boer fighters kept even their weapons, and Great Britain the vic-
torpaid three million pounds in reparations. Those terms, after
two and a half years of war, showed a remarkable breadth of view.
They could not end the conflict of nationalities, but they did open a

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ing the forces personified by Chamberlain, but he curbed them
enough to maintain a surface of concord within the cabinet and
party. It was fitting that this conservative of Conservatives should
retire at a moment when the Victorian world was beyond con-
serving.

VII Forces of Reform

THE ENDING of the Boer War unloosed a clamor for domestic
change such as had not been heard for thirty years. By 1906 Britain
was once more on the verge of a revolution by consent; at the same
time she was revolutionizing her foreign policy to conform to her
new position in the world. These two upheavals were interrelated in
their causes although disparate in their effects. Between them they
refashioned the Victorian framework into that of modern Britain.

The demand for social change was in large measure the effect of
foreign economic competition, which by 1900 was becoming serious.
In industry Britain was far behind the United States and Germany
in the production of iron and steel, and behind the United States in
the output of coal. In agriculture the amount of land tinder cultiva-
tion had fallen by more than a quarter in thirty years, and the num-
ber of agrarian laborers had decreased proportionately; British
farmers, it seemed, were drowning in a flood of imported American
wheat. In commerce the great North Sea ports of the Continent
were handling, for the first time in centuries, a greater volume of
foreign trade than English ports. The heyday of Britain's economy
was passing just when her experiment with democracy was begin-
ning.

The most notable effect was on the labor movement. The trade
unions had hitherto drawn their strength from the aristocracy of
skilled labor, and their principal efforts had been devoted to collec-
tive bargaining; the masses of unskilled labor had been left, for the
most part, to a few earnest missionaries of Marx. The doctrinaire vi-
olence of the Marxist creed was in the spirit of the revolutionary
chartists, and for that very reason it failed to win mass support. The
British workingman, like his compatriots, had too much sense of
humor to be led to the barricades by logicians. The Marxist mis-
sionaries did succeed, however, in regimenting segments of the for-
gotten proletariat for dramatic and successful strikes, which so im-
pressed the young generation of labor leaders that they began to

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the labor leaders into politicians, for they could not appeal success-
fully to the legislature until they acquired greater political weight.

They had already begun to make their presence felt in the com-
mons. As early as 1892 the left wing of the labor movement had or-
ganized its members in the House, and at the turn of the century
the central representative body, the Trade Union Congress, author-
ized the creation of an independent parliamentary group that soon
became known as the Labour Party. Its aims were implicitly social-
istic, and its technique was Fabian: it would ally with neither ma-
jor party but would support whichever one might, at the moment,
<f be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interest of labor."
The arrival of this political infant, of dubious parentage and unpre-
dictable strength, came at a critical moment.

The Conservative Party was at loggerheads on an issue that
closely concerned labor. Salisbury's retirement had left the center
of the stage to Chamberlain, who was the hope of many socialists.
He was still the radical of his earlier years, and his imperialism
sprang in part from his fascination with the democratic dominions,
in part from his emphasis on the state as power. Here was the man
who could win labor's support, if any one could, for a dynamic pro-
gram of Tory democracy. Just when the opportunity was brightest,
however, he chose to advance a program that alienated the rank
and file of the working classes.

La 1903 he resigned from the cabinet to campaign for protection.
Britain's position in the world, he was convinced, was now so pre-
carious that she could no longer afford the luxury of free trade. She
existed as a power primarily because of her empire, and could com-
pensate for her weakening political ties with the dominions only by
strengthening her economic ties through a system of preferential
tariffs, to pump the blood of trade through imperial arteries; such a
system was obviously impossible unless she herself abandoned free
trade. The logic of imperialism, in short, led him to attack the eco-
nomic gospel accepted by both parties for half a century. Although
his program of domestic tariffs was largely borrowed from the fair-
traders of twenty years before, his motive was different. Where they
had been concerned with protecting the economic strength of Brit-
ain, he was concerned with the whole empire. At home he advocated
sweeping social reform, financed by the taxation of imports, but he
envisaged a Britain that would be only the hub of a vast community,

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gruntied Unionists began to join them the prospect of a sweeping
victory dawned.

Such a victory was impossible, even in defense of free trade, un-
less the party shook off the Gladstonian albatross. Britain was in two
simultaneous crises, in her domestic growth and her world position,
and the Liberals had to convince the electorate of their ability to
handle both; they needed a daring domestic program to win the
independent labor vote, and a strong imperial policy to win the
confidence of a nation that was still, though sobered, far from hum-
bled. In the grip of necessity the right wing gave way. The party
adopted a domestic platform of virtual state socialism, and in exter-
nal affairs it accepted the new principles on which the Conservative
government had been acting since the close of the Boer War. By
1906 a Liberal triumph at the polls meant drastic change at home,
but abroad it meant diplomatic continuity.

Continuity was badly needed. From 1902 on, the Conservative
government was abandoning the nation's time-honored aloofness to-
ward other powers. A few months before Vereeniging Britain broke
her unwritten law against a peacetime standing alliance by conclud-
ing a defensive treaty with Japan. In 1904 she came to terms -with
France, and so ended the antagonism that had overshadowed her
statecraft for a generation. In 1905-6 she went a step farther, and
gave France active support. These events revealed a shift in her for-
eign policy commensurate with her changed position in the world,
and the Liberals* acceptance of the shift precluded a return to
isolation.

VIII The Diplomatic Revolution

THE DIPLOMATIC revolution that began in 1902 can be under-
stood only in the context of European diplomacy during the previous
decade. In the years after Bismark's retirement in 1890, a new spirit
animated the German government, and a new alignment took form
on the Continent. Britain at first paid little attention to develop-
ments that seemed remote from her, but all too soon she discov-
ered her mistake. French and Russian policy made her position dif-
ficult, and German policy made it untenable.

The crux of developments was in Berlin. Germany had come to
tie parting o the ways, and the path she took would inevitably de-
temtine though not, perhaps, as she expected the path Great

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her nest and making the value of her good will painfully obvious
in London.

Another development in Germany was even more painful: she
was building a navy. As long as she had none her growing empire
existed on sufferance; its insecurity galled her and limited the pres-
sure she could put on Britain. The case for naval expansion had al-
ready been made by an American naval officer, whose argument had
been aimed at his own country but found its first mark in Ger-
many. Captain Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
1660-1783 had for its theme the triumph of British over French im-
perialism, and its thesis was that Britain had achieved the prerequi-
site of empire, control of the seas, by defeating and blockading the
Bourbon navies; the core of sea power is the battle fleet, according
to Mahan, and victory comes to the side that seeks decisive battle.
This was the German concept of land war applied to the ocean, and
it inevitably appealed to minds bred on the theory of Clausewitz
and the practice of Von Moltke. The Kaiser was deeply impressed,
and distributed copies of the book to the officers of his infant fleet.
"Before everything else," he wrote, "I must provide myself with a
navy. In twenty years' time, when the navy will be ready, I shall
speak a very different language.'* 3

The naval program was launched in 1898, when the Fashoda cri-
sis was underlining the importance of sea power in diplomacy and
the American victory over Spain was projecting a new and unwel-
come complication into Germany's Far Eastern designs. Then came
the Boer War, which brought home to Germany the need of a great
fleet much as the Seven Years' War had brought it home to Bour-
bon France; in 1900 the Reichstag, on a wave of frustrated Anglo-
phobia, doubled the speed of naval construction. The British Ad-
miralty realized that for the first time in a century it had to face a
determined and methodical challenge.

The challenge seemed as hopeless as David's to Goliath. But the
Germans, like David, had technical and psychological advantages.
Because they were beginning from almost nothing, they could in-
corporate the newest developments in their ships; Britain had mil-
lions invested in the existing fleet, and solicitude for the taxpayer
combined with professional conservatism to retard modernization.

Quoted by Elie Hatevy: A History of the English People: Epilogue, I,

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The Boer War revealed a depth of antagonism in Germany that
shocked the British public, and the cabinet virtually abandoned
hope of an accord. Russia was acutely hostile because of the Anglo-
Japanese alliance, and France was still smoldering after Fashoda.
Britain was no longer minded to face the three corners of the world
in arms, but where could she look for help? The answer was sug-
gested by a number of factors, and all of them pointed to Paris.
King Edward knew and liked France, and had a real if intangible
influence on foreign policy. The French were still interested in bar-
gaining, despite their bitterness, and the focus of their African am-
bitions had shifted to Morocco. The British were also willing to bar-
gain over Morocco, as they had not been over the Sudan. They
were intent on keeping any major power away from the Moroccan
coast opposite Gibraltar; the rest of the country mattered little to
them. They at last agreed to discuss simultaneously all the sources
of Anglo-French friction, and even to talk about the Nile Valley.
Their earlier intransigence was gone, and they hoped to exchange
an Egyptian quid for a Moroccan quo.

The diplomatic horse-trade that resulted was global in scope. It
touched on French privileges in the Newfoundland fisheries, fron-
tiers in Nigeria, spheres of influence in Siam, customs rights in Mad-
agascar. The crux of discussion was North Africa. Here France fi-
nally renounced her interest in Egypt; Britain in return agreed to
the establishment of French hegemony in all Morocco except the
northern coast, which was assigned to the innocuous Spaniards. The
final agreement, reached in April 1904, gave birth to the Entente
Cordiale.

The entente was in no sense an alliance. It was based on the set-
tlement of intricate and far-ranging differences, not on mutual com-
mitments. The two governments, it is true, promised to support each
other diplomatically in carrying out their agreement, but who knew
what such support might mean? Not Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay,
for the diplomacy of each would be guided by events more than
words. Not, above all, the Wilhelmstrasse. Any measure of under-
standing between Britain and France was unwelcome to Germany
because it decreased Britain's dependence on the Triple Alliance.
But was the entente a real understanding, or only a fragile truce
that would break under pressure? The German government re-

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1902 the government that had gloried in splendid isolation began
the flight from it. The reasons undercut partisan politics, and radi-
cals later continued what conservatives had started.

The parallel domestic crisis brought no such agreement. Cham-
berlain and his followers advanced the panacea of protection. The
Tories parted company with them and reverted to the perennial role
of defending a dead status quo. The Liberals remained as conserva-
tive as the Tories on the tariff issue, and became full-fledged radi-
cals in social policy. Their program swept the polls in the "parlia-
mentary revolution" of 1906, which was followed by eight years of
revolution by statute. During those years the nation was absorbed
with its internal quarrels, while in foreign policy the Liberals were
leading it unwittingly but inexorably toward war. By the time the
storm broke in 1914 the Britain of the Pax Britannica was like the
peace itself, only a memory.

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damages and permitted them to use their funds in politics. It regu-
lated hours and conditions of labor, universalized the principle of
workmen's compensation, established a national network of labor ex-
changes, grappled with slum clearance and state care of children,
and inaugurated old-age pensions as a first installment of social se-
curity; simultaneously it interfered with the system of land tenure
in order to encourage peasant proprietorship. This cataract of
change, unloosed by the party once dedicated to laissez faire, had
two immediate effects. It created conflict between the Houses of
Parliament, and it placed a heavy burden on the Exchequer.

The House of Lords, like the Supreme Court in the United States,
tends to acquire the political color of a party long in power, and to
change slowly after a change of administration. In 1906 the peerage
was a motley assortment, ranging from the old landed families to
plutocrats recently ennobled for contributing to Conservative party
funds. But most of the peers agreed in opposing increased state ac-
tivities and the concomitant increase in taxation. The Upper House
was consequently the instrument of the Conservatives.

The situation was analogous to that produced thirty years later in
the United States by the attitude of the Supreme Court. The Liberal
government, like the New Deal, struggled against an unelective
body that it could not control. The lords were circumspect; they
knew from the experience of 1832 that on a major issue they could
not defy the will of the commons backed by the electorate. But
their legislative veto was far from defunct, and they were in the
habit of pruning bills to their taste. They had often halted Glad-
stone on minor points, and had climaxed their recalcitrance by
throwing out his second Home Rule Bill amid -widespread applause.
Now they were applying the same tactics to the new liberalism,
amending and delaying until they had the chance of a real blow,
and their obstruction was angering an impatient cabinet.

The financial problem was as disturbing as the constitutional. Al-
most every change in the statute book required an increased bu-
reaucracy to supervise it, and measures such as old-age pensions
were a direct drain on the Treasury; further drains came from the
attempt to pay off the costs of the Boer War and from increased
naval construction. A developing struggle for priority brought out
the divergence inherent in any government that faces, Janus-like,
inward and outward simultaneously: domestic reformers insisted on

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changes of policy upon which the electorate had not been consulted;
if the Liberals chose to disguise a social revolution as a finance bill,
the Upper House was justified in reasserting its veto power as the
only way to force the government to dissolve and seek a specific
mandate from the voters.

The government took up the challenge, and was returned early in
1910 with the slimmest of majorities. Liberals and Conservatives
were now so evenly balanced that the Labour and Irish members
were of key importance. Both groups sided with the Liberals, one
because of what had been done and was promised for labor, the
other because the lords were still adamant against Home Rule. With
this reduced and ill-assorted following the cabinet advanced confi-
dently to the attack. As a result of the election the lords accepted
the budget, but they had now precipitated the constitutional issue.
A bill was brought in to curb their veto power. They rejected it. For
the second time within a year the Liberals appealed to a sorely con-
fused electorate, and they -were returned with the same meager ma-
jority as before. This time the Upper House refused to give way.

Meanwhile King Edward had died. His son, George V, took the
crown at a moment of boiling crisis. The Conservatives insisted that
the nation had not pronounced decisively. The Liberals insisted
that it had. Their position was strong because they and their' allies
could carry on the government, whereas their opponents could not.
The new King consented to create the necessary number of peers to
pass the bill some four hundred, who would have swamped the
aristocracy with titled Liberal nobodies. Before this threat, at once
social and constitutional, the lords capitulated. In 1911 the Parlia-
ment Bill became law: the Upper House lost all control over what-
ever was certified by the speaker of the House of Commons as a
money bill, and retained only a two-year suspensive veto over other
legislation. The flood of reform could no longer be effectively
dammed.

Lloyd George used the opportunity to push through a far-reach-
ing scheme of social insurance. Old-age pensions were supplemented
by health insurance for all wage-earners, and the attempt was be-
gun on a small scale to insure against unemployment. Such state so-
cialism, largely financed by taxation of the rich, aroused bitter con-
troversy. But it was nothing to the storm raised by the next step. In

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promise. The Ulster leaders had sown the wind and were caught in
the whirlwind; they dared not moderate their demands lest their
followers desert them. The Home Rule leaders in the south knew
that they must triumph or give place to the extremists. The cabinet
was too deeply committed to turn back half way, particularly when
the cause of Ulster was linked with embattled privilege at home.
The Conservatives were determined to use the Irish issue to win
public opinion and avert the disaster they foresaw'. The cleavage in
the British political world was deeper even than in 1886, for this
time it involved fundamentals of both domestic and foreign policy.
In 1914 the third Home Rule Bill was finally pushed through,
just when the European crisis was becoming desperate. Irish af-
fairs were once more, as in the days of the Directory, a factor in
diplomatic calculations, and in Berlin the hope grew that Britain's
troubles would immobilize her. How could a government faced by
a civil war dare to gamble on a foreign one? The question was rea-
sonable, but it ignored the extraordinary blend of stolidity and ro-
manticism in the British character. By September 1914 the public
had forgotten the Irish for the Belgians, the Home Rule Bill was
suspended for the duration of the war, and Conservatives were at
one with Liberals. Underneath the vociferous passions of the pre-
vious eight years was a core of unity.

II The Road to War

BRITAIN'S intervention in Europe in 1914 was the outgrowth of
the uncompleted diplomatic revolution that the Liberals inherited
from the Conservatives. By 1906 the Entente Cordiale was evolving,
thanks to the Moroccan crisis, from a negative settlement of differ-
ences into positive collaboration. But France had to walk warily for
fear of alienating her one ally, Russia, who was still at loggerheads
with Britain. If the entente was to become truly cordial and the pol-
icy that it represented was to be fully developed, Britain had to
come to terms with Russia.

The Liberal government was more open to this idea than its pred-
ecessor had been. The Gladstonian tradition, unlike the Disraelian,
was largely free of Russophobia, and diplomacy by negotiation had
been Gladstone's forte. The Conservatives had borrowed a leaf
from his book in concluding the entente, and the Liberals were

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sia, as she laad drawn toward the Netherlands long before, because
her lesser enmities were overshadowed by a greater one.

The Anglo-Russian agreement extended the Entente Cordiale into
the Triple Entente. In 1907, as in 1904, no one knew what the new
phrase meant, and uncertainty again contributed to a crisis. In 1908
the Young Turk revolution disrupted the Ottoman state, and Aus-
tria-Hungary seized the opportunity to annex the provinces of Bos-
nia and Herzegovina, which she had administered since 1878. Rus-
sia demanded, in return, the right of passage for her warships
through the Dardanelles. Britain made it plain that she would not
be drawn into the quarrel; she protested both Austria's action and
Russia's demand. Berlin, on the other hand, supported Vienna
wholeheartedly, and Russia had to capitulate without compensation.

This Balkan crisis, like that of thirty years before, brought Europe
to the brink of war, but it did not produce even a temporary settle-
ment. Instead it touched off the powder-train that led to the explo-
sion of 1914. Austria violated the Treaty of Berlin and flouted what
was left of the public law of Europe. Germany, in supporting her,
showed that what she considered her encirclement by the Triple
Entente only increased her belligerence. But the effect in the Bal-
kans was the most important. There a situation was developing,
thanks in great part to the annexation of Bosnia, that soon defied
settlement by peaceful means.

Both Russian and Austro-German imperialism operated largely
through influence in the Balkan capitals. The small states were not
puppets, but each looked in some measure to the support of Vienna
or St. Petersburg* Austria's particular protege was Bulgaria; Rus-
sia's was Serbia. For years the Serbs had dreamed of including
Bosnia-Herzegovina in a great kingdom of the southern Slavs, ruled
from Belgrade; once the provinces were incorporated into the
Hapsburg Empire, their liberation and consequently the destruction
of the empire itself became the goal of Serbian nationalists. To the
Austrian government that goal appeared steadily more dangerous
as Russia's concern for Serbia increased, and in high circles at Vi-
enna the idea gained ground that the preservation of the empire de-
pended on crushing Serb agitation once and for all.

The attitude of Russia was equally dangerous. As she turned to-
ward the West, she began to consider herself the protector of all
the Slavic peoples; this sense of her mission was the one active, pop-

Star of Empire

firmly tied to France, Russia's ally. Germany seemed determined to
complete this Anglo-French rapprochement: she was pursuing the
naval race despite British efforts to curb it by agreement, and was
widening the Kiel Canal to accommodate her latest battleships; at
the same time she was hastening to increase her army, and was still
pressing her designs upon Morocco. She thereby alarmed both Brit-
ain and France, and their common fears pulled them closer.

The German plan of campaign, if war came, -was known in gen-
eral outline. It was as disturbing to the British Foreign Office as to
the French general staff, because it involved the invasion of Bel-
gium. The reason was not one of politics but of military geography.
The formation of the Dual Alliance had confronted German strate-
gists with the problem of war on two fronts, and their solution was
to destroy the French armies before the slow power of Russia could
be mobilized on the east. The need for a quick victory over France
precluded attacking her hilly and fortified eastern frontier, and dic-
tated an invasion of the northeastern lowlands by way of Belgium.
The design for this movement, sketched in 1905 by the German
chief of staff, Count Schlieffen, provided for a concentration on the
German right wing, which -would swing into northeastern France
like an opening door with its hinge at Metz, and push the French
armies before it southward and southeastward until they were
crushed against their own border fortresses. The crux of the plan
was the attack through Belgium. In 1839 Prussia had been one of
the powers that had guaranteed Belgian independence and neutral-
ity, and Germany had inherited the obligation. Now, under the plea
of strategic necessity, she was preparing to violate it.

Britain's concern was more than traditional. Although she was the
particular guarantor of Belgium, she had not always been ready to
honor her commitment. In 1914 she was, because it touched her fun-
damental interests. If she opposed the expansion of German sea
power in Morocco, she had infinitely more reason to oppose it on
the Channel coast. The defense of Belgium, furthermore, was the
defense of France, and a French defeat would leave the islanders
alone against a triumphant and pugnacious Germany. By coming to
terms with one side and not with the other Britain had involved
herself. The fact that the involvement was largely unintended and
even more largely unrecognized deepened the anomaly of her
position.

Star of Empire

Moroccan crisis. When they revealed that the British army was un-
prepared to act on the Continent, it was reorganized into a small
but supremely efficient expeditionary force ready to be transported
across the Channel; the French naturally made plans to receive it
and deploy it with their armies. Meanwhile the French and British
Admiralties reached an agreement in 1912, whereby the French
moved the bulk of their fleet to the Mediterranean and the British
denuded their squadrons there for a further concentration in home
waters. Thenceforth the fate of France, if war came, depended in
large measure on Britain. If the Royal Navy did not guard the
French Channel coast, it would be open to a German attack from
the sea; if the British army did not promptly take its assigned posi-
tion, the French would have to revise their defensive at the last
minute and with inferior numbers. Yet Britain had no formal
commitment.

The scale of the military preparations was unknown to the pub-
He. Some steps had been revealed, such as the naval agreement, but
their implications were almost universally ignored in the excite-
ment of the domestic crisis. When the storm clouds suddenly gath-
ered over Europe, the leaders of the cabinet were in a quandary.
They had not taken into their confidence all their official colleagues,
let alone the House of Commons, and they had certainly used a freer
hand in dealing with France than comported with a strict interpre-
tation of responsible government. They could not give a categorical
warning to Germany, or assurance to France, without first securing
the support of Parliament at the cost of revelations that would
have been highly embarrassing and inexpedient to make. Only the
Germans could resolve the dilemma. If their invasion of Belgium
aroused British public opinion, the cabinet would have the backing
it needed and could move in time on the preconcerted lines. If not,
the prospect was too dark to contemplate.

At the end of June 1914 the British heard that the heir apparent
to the Hapsburg Empire had been assassinated in Sarajevo, the Bos-
nian capital. The news seemed trivial by comparison with that from
Ireland, but the European powder-train was burning in the maga-
zine. The Austrian authorities learned that the murder had been as-
sisted, if not planned, in Serbia, and they suspected complicity in the
Belgrade government This "was the opportunity for which they had
long been waiting, and in dealing with it they seemed likely to have

Star of Empire

were already pouring across the Belgian frontier. The British people
neither knew nor cared about the strategic imperative behind the
Schlieffen Plan. They were shocked at the assault; on an unoffending
state that Germany was pledged to defend, and their political mood
veered. Conservatives closed ranks with Liberals, Ulsterites, and
even Home Rulers. Several members of the cabinet resigned rather
than approve the ultimatum to Berlin which was sent on August
4 and expired unanswered at midnight but the government had
behind it a solidly united nation. The bitterest partisan strife in
modern British history was transmuted into singleness of will.

The causes of this transmutation went back for years. When Ger-
many had begun to achieve hegemony in Europe, her concepts of
power had been temporarily emulated in Britain. But by the turn of
the century their appeal had faded. Thereafter the public had grown
increasingly alarmed as German militarism had taken to the sea, in-
creasingly angry as German bullying had troubled the peace with
crisis after crisis, and the attack on Belgium brought this popular
feeling into focus. It scoured away factionalism for a time, some-
what as the feeling against James and Louis XIV had scoured away
the blood feuds of Whigs and Tories. The British rallied to what
they considered the old cause of resisting aggression, and their
mood was all the more fervent for the rancor it superseded.

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage. 1

Ill From Blitzkrieg to Deadlock

IN this exalted mood Britain embarked on the struggle for which
the government had been preparing her. She assumed, like her al-
lies and her enemies, that the war would be bitter but brief, and for
such a war she was more nearly ready than ever before in her his-
tory. The Royal Navy, thanks to the efforts of the Foreign Office,
had been able to mass almost nine-tenths of its strength in home wa-
ters. Its base had been shifted from the Channel to the Firth of

1 Rupert Brooke: "The Dead," I. Reprinted by permission o Dodd, Mead &
Company, Inc., from The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, copyright, 1915,
by Dodd, Mead & Company.

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stinctively rejected. But the halting of the Germans at the Marne
and the subsequent stabilization of the line ended tie warfare of
maneuver, the soldiers* only method of forcing a quick decision. On
the Eastern Front also, in spite of staggering Russian defeats at the
outset, the line was stabilized by the close of the year. A wholly dif-
ferent kind of war was beginning. No one had expected it or pre-
pared for it. No one had a way to win it quickly. No one understood
how to wage it except by squandering blood.

The essence of trench warfare was the superiority of defense over
attack. The defenders had enormous fire power, thanks to the im-
provement in rifles and artillery and, above all, to the machine gun;
they had barbed wire to preclude surprise; they had dugouts from
which only an extravagant barrage would move them, and more
dugouts to which to retire. Their position could not be turned, for
neither the Eastern nor the Western Front had vulnerable flanks.
Frontal assault was the sole way to decide the war by military
means, and the available means were insufficient.

The generals of both sides refused to admit the insufficiency.
They had been trained on the doctrine of the offensive, and offen-
sives they would have. When one failed, they improved their tech-
niques for the next, always hoping and planning for the break-
through that never came. The cost in materiel and in human life
rose to astronomical proportions; still the experiments went on. But
battle was no longer the decisive factor. Europe was locked in gi-
gantic siege operations, in which victory would come by the attri-
tion of manpower, industrial resources, food supplies, and morale,
rather than by generalship.

In Britain the demand for manpower had revolutionary effects.
When the government had committed the regular army to the West-
ern Front, it had embarked on a policy from which there was no
turning back. By the spring of 1915 the regulars, as a fighting force,
had ceased to exist.

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundation fled,

Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead. 2

2 A. E. Housman: "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries." From Last Poems
by A. E. Housman. Copyright, 1922, by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

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paths. The first led him into a disaster, the second to a development
that changed the character of warfare.

The need for a diversion from the Western Front arose in the au-
tumn of 1914, when the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Ger-
many and Austria. The principal reason for this step was the Russo-
British rapprochement, which convinced the Young Turks that their
only hope lay in a German victory. The principal effect was to iso-
late the Western allies from Russia. Their only remaining contact
with her armies was by sea, either around Scandinavia or across the
Pacific and the Transsiberian Railroad. Russia's industrial resources
could not begin to meet her requirements, and she was soon desper-
ately short of supplies. Unless Britain and France broke through to
her, she could not keep up the fight for long.

This was the problem Churchill attacked. He found a bold solu-
tion, that the navy should fight its way through the straits to Con-
stantinople, knock the Turks out of the war, open a Balkan flank,
and link the Eastern with the Western Front. He overrode the op-
position of his First Sea Lord and gained the consent of the cabinet
for the gamble. Britain, after a century of guarding the straits
against Russia, was now trying to open them for her.

The expedition was appallingly mismanaged. Early in 1915 a
Franco-British naval force was driven back from the Dardanelles
with heavy losses. An army, predominantly of Australians and New
Zealanders, was then sent to open the straits by seizing the penin-
sula of Gallipoli. The troops met a blistering reception. Throughout
the summer and autumn they dung to their beachheads, and in the
winter they were evacuated. Meanwhile the Serbs had been over-
whelmed, and the central powers reigned supreme in the Balkans.
The attempt to turn their position had failed disastrously.

The failure cost Churchill his position at the Admiralty. Before he
resigned, however, he initiated one of the major experiments of the
war. He believed that the deadlock in the west could be broken not
by sending men, as he put it, "to chew barbed wire," but by a vehi-
cle that would carry item through it and protect them from the ma-
chine gun. The vehicle was the tank. When the War Office was scep-
tical of its possibilities, he nourished experimentation with Admiralty
funds. The process of development was slow, and the enlightenment
of the military mind was slower. Not until the autumn of 1917 did
tanks achieve the breakthrough for which they were designed, and

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cept for the Gallipoli fiasco; the French and British generals were
interested only in the Western Front, and Lloyd George could not
overrule them. But in other ways sea power was crucial from the
beginning. It helped to induce Italy, with her vulnerable coasts and
dependence on water-borne imports, to desert the Triple Alliance
and join the Western powers, whose hold on the Mediterranean
then became incontestable. Japan insisted on honoring her alliance,
in order to further her own Far Eastern interests, and she helped to
sweep German warships from the Pacific. The oceans of the world
were highways for the allies.

Britain's naval effort was focused on the Channel and the North
Sea, where she established her blockade of the Central Powers.
Blockade was a stronger weapon than when she had last used it
against Napoleon, thanks to the development of steam power and
wireless, but its application was retarded for a time by the insistence
of the United States on her right to trade with neutrals. Through
the ports of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, Germany received
quantities of American goods, and the flow was not entirely shut
off until the United States entered the war. Yet Britain checked it
more and more as she became more confident of American sympathy
for her cause, and the Central Powers were gradually thrown back
upon their own dwindling reserves.

The effect was to drive Germany to a counterattack that com-
pleted the alienation of the United States. The great advantage of
the submarine was that it could by-pass superior sea power to es-
tablish a blockade of its own, by which Germany hoped to circum-
vent the deadlock on land and do what Napoleon had failed to do,
starve Britain into surrender. The great disadvantage of the sub-
marine was not its illegality for the British were just as cavalier
about international law but the character of its illegality. The
U-boat was so vulnerable to surface attack that its effectiveness de-
pended on sinking ships without warning or succor, whereas a Brit-
ish destroyer could herd a merchantman into port for the formalities
of confiscation. The two procedures might be equally illegal, but in
the eyes of the world the difference between them was that between
murder and decorous robbery.

Early in 1916 the German U-boat campaign reached major pro-
portions. It took its toll in American property and lives, and evoked
stronger protests from Washington than Britain had ever received.

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Jellicoe was the only man, as Churchill pointed out, who could
have lost the war in an afternoon. He could have lost it, however,
only by the most profligate squandering of his strength, which in-
stead he hoarded like a miser. In doing so he helped to prolong the
war. If Blake or Nelson had been in his place, British losses would
have been appalling; but the German fleet, in all probability, would
not have returned to port. In that case the British would have been
able to mine Germany's coastal waters, attack her submarines al-
most at harbor mouth, enter the Baltic to cut off her trade with
Sweden and, above all, to carry supplies to Russia and so postpone
or perhaps avert the impending debacle in the East. "A victory," as
Jervis had remarked before the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, "is very
essential to England at this hour," But at Jutland victory slipped
through her fingers.

The results were far-reaching for all the powers, including the
United States. The battle convinced the German government that
Britain's naval superiority could not be overcome in time to affect
the issue. Germany was being slowly strangled by the blockade, and
her only chance to break it was to concentrate her whole naval effort
on submarines. The result would undoubtedly be war with the
United States, it was argued on the Wilhelmstrasse, but what had
Germany to lose? American bankers were floating the loans to fi-
nance allied purchases of the munitions that American factories
were supplying. The German High Command calculated, quite ac-
curately, that American armies could not be a significant factor in
Europe for at least a year; within that time Germany would in any
case have to win or lose. These arguments prevailed with the im-
perial government. In February 1917 it declared unrestricted sub-
marine warfare on practically all ships in European waters, neutral
or belligerent. President Wilson immediately severed diplomatic
relations, and by April the United States was at war.

The American action has subsequently been explained in a num-
ber of ways. It has been laid, for example, to the superiority of allied
over German propaganda, and alternatively to the growing Ameri-
can economic interest in allied victory. The first explanation deals
in symptoms rather than causes. Allied propaganda was more effec-
tive because the allied position was more comprehensible to the
American public. The German infatuation with power grew under
the stress of war into a cry for world dominion or destruction, Welt-

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developed into a crusade to save the moral order; in this great en-
terprise the American people joined with an enthusiasm both genu-
ine and temporary. The sight of a moral goal can be intoxicating,
like the sight of power, but the reaction is likely to be painful. When
the war was won and the world remained dangerous for democracy,
most Americans denied the validity of the crusade and sought ex-
planations for it. They seized on the myth of Machiavellian intri-
guers, munitions-makers and financiers; they largely ignored the
economic realities and wholly ignored the strategic. Not until it was
drawn into the second World War did the nation begin to suspect
the nature of the forces that had drawn it into the first.

IV Victory and Versailles

THE ENTRANCE of the United States in the spring of 1917 came
when catastrophe was brewing in the East. Russia had suffered the
greatest losses of all the combatants; she was starved for supplies,
and the British showed no sign of breaking a road to her. Under the
strain her social and political structure crumbled. In March the
Czar abdicated. The provisional government attempted to continue
the war while the country disintegrated in revolution and the Ger-
mans advanced. In November the communists seized power. They
were pledged to peace at any price, and they paid their price in the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; the Central Powers partitioned European
Russia from the Baltic provinces to the Ukraine an indication of
what German victory would mean to the West.

Before the effects of Russia's collapse became apparent, her allies
had fought and won their battle with the submarine. During most
of 1917 the U-boat was the crucial problem of the war. Germany
had prepared her campaign thoroughly, and its effects were devastat-
ing. Losses mounted to their peak in April, when Britain had only a
six weeks' reserve of grain; roughly a quarter of the ships leaving her
ports never returned. She was on the brink of destruction. Lloyd
George for once overruled the professionals, and forced a reluctant
Admkalty to adopt the convoy system. Simultaneously the United
States threw in her resources: she sent destroyers to Europe, and be-
gan the intensive construction of merchantmen; her shipyards did as
much to win the war as all her armies a year later. Convoys, new
construction, and improved methods for detecting and attacking the

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Star of Empire

The armistice terms, designed for the immediate military security
of the West, bore the hallmarks of the British Admiralty and the
French general staff. Germany surrendered almost the whole of her
fleet, and its last voyage was to Scapa Flow, the British base in the
Orkneys; such an unparalleled triumph seemed to banish Britain's
anxieties of the past twenty years. The German armies abandoned
all their conquests and withdrew from the entire left bank of the
Rhine and from three bridgeheads on the right bank; allied occupa-
tion forces moved in. Germany remained helpless as long as the
victors continued their watch on the Rhine, and her helplessness
was security for France.

The ensuing peace congress, like the Congress of Vienna, pro-
duced bitter wrangling among the powers. Each of the three major
victors had entered the war for reasons of its own, and each brought
to the Paris Conference its own peculiar point of view. The United
States had not fought for material gains or, consciously, in self-
defense, but because she had been outraged by German ruthless-
ness. She had not endured an ordeal like Verdun or seen the shadow
of starvation thrown by the U-boat, and she knew little about the
impact of these experiences upon her allies. She was willing to assist
in rebuilding a new and better Europe, but she lacked the concern
and understanding to involve herself deeply in the task. France, on
the contrary, had borne the brunt of the war in the West, and it had
bled her white; defense against the Germans was a central thread of
her history, as it was not of British or American, and she was de-
termined to exploit her one great chance to safeguard herself. Brit-
ain's position was halfway between the other two. She and the
dominions, unlike the United States, had a territorial objective: to
acquire as much as possible of the German colonial empire. But to-
ward Europe her attitude was similar to the American. She had
entered the war essentially to protect the Continent against German
hegemony and herself against a naval threat; the flight of the Kaiser,
the collapse of his armies, and particularly the surrender of his fleet
had left her almost carefree about the future. She and the United
States had achieved their fundamental aims before the peace con-
ference met. France had not.

The British and American delegations had common premises,
and on many issues they saw eye to eye. President Wilson had
awaked the idealism of a war-weary Europe, and when he reached

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ment in international organization written into the treaties, and the
resolution of the Anglo-American disagreements generated by the
war.

The principle of self-determination underlying the territorial set-
tlement was not created out of whole Wilsonian cloth. The right of
peoples to governments of their own choosing had been implicit in
nineteenth-century nationalism, and had been dramatically asserted
in many parts of Europe before the Paris Conference met. The
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk liad detached the Baltic states from Russia;
the Hapsburg Empire had broken into its national segments; the
allies had pledged themselves to a reconstituted Poland, on which
the Poles were already hard at work. The peacemakers had to deal
with a map that had come alive and was reforming itself; they could
determine its details, but not its broad outlines. Their efforts were
focused on drawing frontiers to accord with national divisions, and
they succeeded so well that only a tiny percentage of Europe's popu-
lation remained under alien rule. The principle guiding them was
old, but its application was so thorough as to be revolutionary.

The resultant map had one salient feature, a band of new or dras-
tically altered states stretching from the Arctic to the Aegean. Out
of the wreck of the czarist empire came Finland, Latvia, Esthonia,
and Lithuania. Out of what had been Russian, German, and Aus-
trian territory emerged the vast bulk of Poland with an outlet to the
Baltic, the so-called Corridor, which cut off East Prussia from the
rest of Germany. Bohemia became the core of a new republic,
Czechoslovakia. The tiny states of Austria and Hungary kept alive
the names of the Dual Monarchy, while the remaining Hapsburg
territories went to Rumania and to the new kingdom of Jugoslavia.
Nationalism was not the unifying force that it had appeared to be
a half -century earlier. It had disrupted the old empires into a con-
geries of smaller states, and the "Balkanization" of Europe had now
spread from the Danube to the Baltic.

The price was instability. The substitution of untried governments
for old loyalties or habits of obedience produced tensions in all the
new states, and their nationalism often resulted in tariff walls that
dammed the traditional channels of trade and impeded economic
recovery. From the viewpoint of power these states were almost a
vacuum. They had little military strength even in combination, and
they were beyond reach of effective assistance from the West. They

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Turned in on herself, disarmed, mortgaged, she seemed to have lost
her capacity for troubling the peace.

The European aspect of the settlement, harsh as it was, repre-
sented a defeat for France. She had striven for a Carthaginian peace
in the West for the complete separation of the Rhineland from
Germany, in the East for a gigantic Poland as a buffer against both
Germany and Russia. Britain and the United States, however, had
insisted that some hope must be left to Germany, lest she be driven
in desperation to embrace communism. They had offered France, if
she would abate her demands, a guarantee to defend her fron-
tiers against attack, and the French had given way grudgingly. They
complained that Lloyd George was being statesmanlike at their
expense.

The gibe had considerable truth. On issues of equivalent concern
to him he showed little sense of moderation. In the division of
colonial spoils he secured the lion's share for Britain, and in the
treaty he obtained naval provisions that seemed to safeguard her
future security; the surrendered German fleet had by now been
scuttled and was at the bottom of Scapa Flow. On the question of
reparations, above all, his moral position was weak. In the armistice
Germany had agreed to pay for all damage done to allied civilians;
a reasonable interpretation of the agreement would have left France
and Belgium with the major claims, Britain with little, and the do-
minions with less. The British public, however, was determined to
make Germany pay the cost of the war. Although Lloyd George
knew it could not be done without disrupting British as well as
German economy, he refused to be statesmanlike at the expense of
his career. Instead he took the lead in inflating the bill to whatever
sum the Germans might conceivably pay. The treaty wisely left the
amount to a reparations commission. But the Weimar Republic was
saddled with a huge initial installment, and was forced, in addition,
to turn over most of its existing merchant marine and to pledge
future construction. The French thereafter were unimpressed when
the British pot called their kettle black.

Britain was also much concerned with the settlement of the Near
and Middle East. There the collapse of Russia and Germany had at
least temporarily eliminated the old dangers, and the disintegration
of the Ottoman Empire permitted Britain to feather her own nest.
The Turks* Arabian dependencies had already broken away, but

Star of Empire

V London, Geneva, and Washington

THE COVENANT of the League of Nations, incorporated in the
peace treaties, became an integral part of the settlement. After 1815
the congress system had soon broken down, but the treaties had en-
dured for generations. After 1919, on the contrary, the system and
the treaties stood and fell together. The great achievements of the
League were in the first decade, when the treaties were still binding,
and its decline in the second decade was the obverse of Hitler's suc-
cess in abrogating the Versailles terms.

The battle over the League reflected the same divergence of aims
as the battle over the Rhineland. The French wished to achieve
security by an international commitment to intervene wherever and
whenever the peace was threatened. They hoped to make of the
League a superstate with an international army and general staff,
and to transfer from the members to the central authority the power
to take action. This proposal ran counter to the tradition of the
English-speaking peoples. They had been bred with a distrust of
any government wielding military force, and with a belief in volun-
tary collaboration and compromise rather than in rigid commit-
ments and coercion. These factors out of their past determined the
kind of League they proposed an organization dependent for its
functioning upon its members* sense of common interest and unable
to act without their virtual unanimity, little more than a forum for
focusing public opinion and concerting joint policy. Nothing more
would have been acceptable in Britain and the dominions, let alone
in the United States. "If the nations of the future are in the main
selfish, grasping, and warlike,** in the words of the official British
commentary on the covenant, **no instrument or machinery will re-
strain them. It is only possible to establish an organization which
may make peaceful co-operation easy and hence customary, and to
trust in the influence of custom to mould public opinion."

The question at issue was an old one. The French regarded the
League as Metternich had regarded the concert of Europe: where he
had feared a resurgence of French power, they feared a resurgence
of German; they were as determined to prevent the one as he the
other, and to use for the purpose a coercive international system.
To the British and Americans a League so designed and used was
unthinkable. They had the memory of 182S to guide them, and the

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Star of Empire

The American action was felt at once throughout the British do-
minions. Their isolationism had much the same roots as that of the
United States, and it gained strength from her example. At a time
when Britain was absorbed with her relationship to them, their atti-
tude affected hers. For her own part, also, she was averse to deep
involvement in Europe. The war had left her nearer exhaustion
than ever before, and the emerging balance of power on the Con-
tinent seemed to offer her the chance to recuperate quietly at home.
The upshot was that she did not assume the leadership that the
United States had relinquished, but began to withdraw into her
old aloofness.

France felt the foundations of her security crumbling. The Anglo-
American guarantee to defend her frontiers was repudiated by the
United States, and Britain's commitment also lapsed. France had
sacrificed her ambitions in the Rhineland only to be left with a kind
of League in which she had no trust, and the great wartime coali-
tion that had saved her was dissolving. Italy was weak and dis-
gruntled, the United States a self-righteous anchorite, even Britain
aloof. France had only herself to rely upon, and she acted accord-
ingly. For a time she occupied the Ruhr, ostensibly to collect repara-
tions; she negotiated alliances successively with Belgium, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Rumania; she began enormous
fortifications on her eastern frontier. In her quest for security she
was reverting to her pre-war techniques.

The reversion antagonized the British. They stigmatized her in-
vasion of the Ruhr as sheer Prussianism, and they had little sym-
pathy with her attempt to encircle Germany by alliances. The idea
of keeping the Weimar Republic permanently bankrupt and impo-
tent outraged their commercial interest, their belief in fair play, and
their sense of political stability. Britain was intent on recovery,
France on security, and this difference in viewpoint separated the
two when everything depended on their close collaboration. During
the first and crucial decade no firm foundation for peace was laid.

A foundation was attempted. By 1925 Germany had recovered
sufficiently to treat with France as an equal but not enough to rouse
acute French fears, and the Weimar Republic had reconciled itself
to accepting its western frontier. Out of this situation came the Lo-
carno treaties, by which Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, and Brit-
ain guaranteed the Versailles settlement as it applied to the Rhine-

340

Stor of Empire

can naval expansion, even when considered in context, was difficult
for them to understand. Yet they had either to accept it passively or
to embark on a naval race for which they were psychologically and
financially unprepared.

The United States, fortunately for them, had no desire to race,
and Japan realized the limitations of her resources. The result was
the Washington Conference of 1921-2, which produced agreements
limiting naval construction and establishing ratios of strength. These
treaties were the one great attempt at disarmament in the inter-war
years. They were also the formal end of Britain's naval predomi-
nance, for she recognized the parity of the United States. At the
same time she abandoned her alliance with Japan. It had lost its
original character of defense, against first Russia and then Germany;
the dominions, particularly Canada, objected to it as being counter
to American interests and an encouragement to Japanese expan-
sion. Its end opened the way for a new era of Anglo-American col-
laboration in the Far East.

The Washington treaties, at the same time, opposed grave ob-
stacles to such collaboration. The agreed ratio, which gave Japan
a navy three-fifths as strong in capital ships as the American or Brit-
ish, made her the dominant power in her own home waters. The
United' States increased the difficulty of defending American Pacific
interests by agreeing to halt fortification of the Philippines, Guam,
and the Aleutians. These steps were in keeping with the American
isolationist mood, yet they involved the country more than ever in
the affairs of the outside -world. The defense of the status quo in the
Far East depended thenceforth upon Anglo-American sea power,
which together had an exiguous margin of safety over Japan. If a
crisis in Europe ever again forced Britain to concentrate her strength
at home, the United States Pacific Fleet might be left with an im-
possible defensive task. Any development in Europe that imperiled
the British Isles, in consequence, would imperil the Philippines as
well. The Washington naval treaties strengthened this interrelation-
ship. By conceding to Japan primacy in the western Pacific they
contributed to the Anglo-American retreat from Asia twenty years
later.

34*

Star of Empire

while the South Africans after suppressing a brief nationalist re-
bellion attended to the nearby German colonies. The experiences
of the war modified dominion loyalty in two ways: Britain's tradi-
tional condescension toward "colonials" galled men and governments
who felt that they were fighting her battles for her, and their own
military exploits heightened their sense of nationalism. Although
the war pulled the empire together in common effort, it also in-
creased the centrifugal forces within it. The dominions had entered
the struggle by declaration of the British government; they emerged
from it determined to make peace for themselves and stand thence-
forth on their own constitutional feet. They signed the treaties and
were admitted to the League as sovereign states, and several ac-
quired mandates; they soon were accorded, or appropriated, greater
and greater diplomatic freedom. Britain could only acquiesce. They
had reached their majority, and the family structure had to be re-
vised accordingly.

During this period the two chief foster children of British im-
perialism, India and Ireland, were also growing toward independ-
ence. In India the climax of benevolent despotism had come at the
turn of the century, and had stimulated a rapid increase in national-
ism. No amount of benevolence could reconcile the intelligent Hindu
or Moslem to alien rule. The outbreak of war, however, aroused a
wave of loyalty, and India's assistance soon won recognition from
Britain. In 1917 came the promise of eventual dominion status; two
years later a new constitution accorded considerable powers of self-
government, and India received independent representation in the
League. But the British consistently refused to grant responsible
central government. Their reasons were more than mere traditional-
ism. The cultural and economic disparities between different parts
of the great subcontinent, the position of the native princes, and
above all the bitter antipathy between religious groups, especially
the Hindus and Moslems, made responsible government look like a
euphemism for anarchy. Although progress was made even by the
standards of militant nationalists, they considered it woefully slow.
Their own dissensions and the conditions of India retarded it as
much as the British dislike for constitutional gambling. Only a
cataclysm could speed the tempo of change, and the cataclysm was
still twenty years away.

To Ireland, on the contrary, the war brought a climatic crisis and

344

Star of Empire

break, but they had been defeated by a nemesis out of the past.
Elizabethan ruthlessness and ineptitude, Jacobean plantation, Crom-
wellian conquest, Whig exploitation the background of brutality
and blunder had generated failure. The Irish had provided no solu-
tion. Their inability to agree among themselves or to discipline their
violence had precluded effective resistance; even in Britain's most
critical moments their -weakness was greater than hers. She finally
broke the bond, not during the war when she was hard pressed, but
in its aftermath of weariness and fancied security, and her terms
were probably as generous as the situation allowed. Partition was a
bitter pill for Irish patriots. But Ulster was given the option, which
she refused, of joining the new dominion, and the possibility remains
open. The Irish problem entered a new phase, in which the onus of
finding a solution for the entire island rests with the Irish them-
selves.

The recognition of the Free State as a dominion in 1923 came at
a time when the whole question of dominion status was under re-
view. In 1926 the principle was expressed at an imperial conference
that the dominions and the mother country were equal juridically,
"in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domes-
tic or external affairs." In 1931 the principle was legalized and fully
defined in the Statute of Westminster, which is the constitution of
the British Commonwealth of Nations. After a century and a half
the vision of Burke came to reality in a way that would have startled
that wise Irishman only slightly more than Durham or Elgin.

The Commonwealth is a kind of league new to history. It is a col-
lection of sovereign states with no legal ties between them except a
common monarch (who is monarch by virtue of being powerless),
no institutional means of concerting policy except the conference
and the telephone, no obligation on any member except to give
notice to the others of actions affecting their interests, no bonds of
unity except those of sentiment and mutual respect. The Common-
wealth functions only as its members recognize their community of
interests and ideals; it is the essence o voluntary collaboration, an
experiment less in international organization than in international
relations. Although it rests upon much the same basic premises as
the League of Nations, its structure is infinitely more amorphous.
Before 1914 few men could have conceived of empire in such terms.

The conception was forced upon post-war Britain, and only in

346

Star of Empire

type of state-controlled emigration that the scientific reformers had
advocated; they advanced an unsuccessful program of tariff reform.
In 1924, after the brief interlude of a Liberal-Labour coalition, they
carried the polls again. This time their victory was at the cost of the
Liberals, who almost disappeared as a party.

The extinction of Liberalism had long been preparing. In 1906
the party had represented the force of a thoroughly British radical-
ism, evangelical in its goal and empirical in its means, with a de-
termination unhampered by the niceties of logic. At that time the
Labour Party had still been in swaddling clothes, and the Liberals
had been the only immediate hope for the left. In their eight years
of power before the war they had educated Britain to the potentiali-
ties of state control; their main achievement, aside from curbing the
House of Lords, had been to suggest what might be done with the
taxing power, pensions, insurance, as means of social welfare. The
party suckled on laissez faire had become the champion of strong
government, while the Conservatives had rejected Disraeli's prin-
ciples in order to champion laissez faire.

The war destroyed the Liberals* monopoly of new ideas. During
the years of coalition their leaders dared not endanger national unity
by pushing social reforms, and many of them especially Lloyd
George soaked up caution by osmosis from their Conservative col-
leagues. Labour, on the other hand, matured rapidly under the stress
of crisis, and the party began to recruit to its ranks many impatient
Liberals. The Conservatives also matured. They were forced to ac-
quiesce, and in some instances to lead, in a tightening of govern-
mental controls over the nation's life, and they ceased to be Whigs
in disguise and returned to their Disraelian tradition. The result, by
the 1920's, was the evolution of two coherent and contrasting par-
ties, Conservative and Labour.

Both discarded laissez faire for a large measure of state control,
but there they parted company. The Conservatives wished to retain
as far as possible the traditional system of private enterprise; they
admitted that government must supervise and, if necessary, sub-
sidize industry, but they opposed direct control. The Labourites, on
the contrary, advocated a gradual expansion of the state into every
aspect of Britain's economy, and the nationalization of key indus-
tries. The Conservatives were willing to use the taxing power to
break up great accumulations of wealth and put idle capital to use,

348

Star of Empire

more attractive than the seven-year Conservative record of failure
to deal with the depression. In 1929 Labour had the misfortune to
win the election, just when the depression was becoming worldwide
and irresistible.

By the spring of 1931 British unemployment was more than double
that of 1929, and relief payments put a heavy strain on the Treasury.
The United States was no longer the great lending market; Ameri-
can creditors were calling their loans. Even the Bank of England
was short of gold. The Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald,
advocated drastic economies in relief and in the social services as
the only chance to stave off bankruptcy. The majority of the cabinet
denounced this course as a betrayal of the socialist cause, and the
division of counsel forced MacDonald to resign. But he was per-
suaded, partly by the personal intervention of the King, that the situ-
ation was too dangerous for constitutional etiquette, and could be
met only by the wartime method of a coalition. He resumed office
at the head of the so-called National Government, which ostensibly
represented all three parties. This administration, in one form or
another, ruled the country for the next fourteen years.

The coalition at once went to the people, on a platform of pro-
tection and retrenchment, and was triumphantly returned. The Con-
servatives acquired a majority of the House; the bulk of Labour,
which had refused to follow MacDonald, now formed the opposi-
tion. The situation had an element of fantasy: a prime minister re-
pudiated by his own party led a government dominated by his late
opponents. The cabinet, nevertheless, acted energetically, and its
first care was to protect the domestic market from foreign competi-
tion. It had already devalued the pound in international exchange
by abandoning the gold standard, and had thereby discouraged im-
ports; by 1932 it established a comprehensive system of tariffs for
the first time since the 184CTs. Even the bedrock of the old liberalism
had now crumbled and been swept away in the tide of depression.

The most immediate effect was in the Commonwealth. The im-
perial economic consolidation that Chamberlain had vainly urged,
MacDonald could now attempt, and in 1932 a conference was sum-
moned at Ottawa to discuss ways and means. The outcome was an
intricate system of agreements for preferential tariffs, embracing
India and the Crown colonies as well as the Commonwealth. The
system actually raised Britain's tariffs on foreign goods without de-

350

Chapter Eight

SLEEP AND WAKING
1932-1945

I The Background of Foreign Policy

IN the seven years between the Ottawa Conference and the in-
vasion of Poland foreign affairs were again the crux of British
history. But the public long remained indifferent to them, and con-
doned a policy of fumbling that a pre-war government could scarcely
have survived. This indifference was less complete than that of the
dominions in the same period, let alone that of the United States;
it was phenomenal, nevertheless, in a nation so close to the cauldron
of Europe, and it challenges explanation. Events were driving the
British out of their isolation toward their greatest crisis, but certain
factors were delaying their awareness of events. The factors were
of two sorts. The first was domestic: the problems of economic and
social transition that distracted public attention. The second was
foreign: the novel characteristics of the danger, which made it diffi-
cult for the public to apprehend. The sum of these factors does not
account for Britain's policy, but it does go far toward making it
understandable.

The nadir of the depression was passed in 1932. From a stagger-
ing total of almost three million the unemployment figures steadily
decreased, and within three yeais prosperity was again in sight. But
it was prosperity differently based. While the manufacture of highly
specialized consumer goods ^was blossoming in the south under the
shadow of protection, mining and heavy industry were still in the
doldrums; what had been some of the world's busiest districts, in
Wales and the north, were now "special areas" filled with idle fao

35*

Star of Empire

if it were God, and had no thought of keeping the nation's powder
dry; as late as the spring of 1939 they fought the return of con-
scription. But they had little effect on policy-making. The bulk of
the party was in opposition, and the segment that had followed
MacDonald exercised less and less influence in the cabinet. In 1935
MacDonald resigned the prime ministership to Stanley Baldwin, the
Conservative leader; thereafter the National Government was Con-
servative in all but name. Its foreign policy, far from being in the
Tory tradition, was essentially Gladstonian, based neither on the
League at one extreme nor on national power at the other, but on
negotiation and good will. For four disastrous years the Conserva-
tives persevered in this policy, while Disraeli turned over in his
grave.

Their perseverance was facilitated by the parliamentary situation.
Labour was too badly rent by its own quarrels, growing out of the
schism of 1931, to be an effective opposition; most of its members,
moreover, shared the cabinet's basic misunderstanding of realities in
Europe. The most powerful critics were not Labourites but dissident
Conservatives hobbled by party allegiance. Thus in the crucial area
of foreign affairs the opposition lost its traditional role: it could not
criticize the substance of policy, let alone offer an alternative, and
it had no hope of turning out the government; the Prime Minister
consequently had all too free a hand. Baldwin's successor, Neville
Chamberlain, used his freedom to the full. When in the spring of
1939 he at last admitted to the nation that his policy had failed,
and reversed it almost overnight, he still retained office. In a period
of normal parliamentary balance the admission of so gigantic a
failure would have unseated the government and brought the op-
position into office. But in 1939 there was no opposition worth the
name, and it was sorely needed.

If the state of politics prevented criticism from coming into focus,
specific domestic issues also distracted attention from the doings of
the Foreign Office. During Baldwin's ministry the issue was a sud-
den constitutional crisis. At the beginning of 1936 the death of
George V brought to the throne a man who was not passive enough
for kingship; Edward VIII had the political interests without the
subtlety of his grandfather, Edward VIL A political king in the
1930*s needed to be infinitely subtle; the significance of the monarch
as the legal and symbolic nexus of the Commonwealth was rapidly

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Star of Empire

The British hoped that the world refashioned at Paris was in
fact made safe for democracy, and the decade of the 1920*s had
given them ground for hope. The Anglo-Saxon concept of the state
as the guarantor of individual rights even against itself seemed to
be widely accepted. But history is not exportable. The English-
speaking peoples had hammered out their rights on the anvil of ex-
perience, and the idea of rights against the state had little meaning
for peoples who had not had similar experience. They might adopt
a democratic system in emulation of Britain or the United States,
but it had no tap root. It sickened in some countries, such as Italy
and Germany, when the regime had to bear the onus of an unpopu-
lar peace settlement, and it died during the depression. The under-
paid and the unemployed lost interest in being free if freedom meant
destitution, and patriots longed for strong government to advance
the national interest. Both turned from democracy to the preachers
of new faiths.

The immediately dangerous faith was national. In the powers that
troubled the peace of the 1930's Japan, Italy, Germany the col-
lectivism of the nation-state was more deeply rooted than demo-
cratic individualism or the communist collectivism of class, and the
worship of the state had been strengthened by the wartime em-
phasis upon its central sacrament, the submersion of the individual
in the group. This secular religion provided the dictators with the
wherewithal for their fanatical crusades. But the British, like the
Americans, instinctively minimized a fanaticism that repudiated all
their postulates; they assumed that it was not too alien to be ame-
nable to reason, to the logic of moderation, to a sense of honor. The
assumption was an unwise but understandable mistake.

The other great collectivist religion was equally alien. Commu-
nism was in theory far more international than the liberal creed, and
the faith that the workers of the world 'would unite to bring in their
own Utopia appealed increasingly to Continental radicals as their
democracies withered in the depression. These rationalists of the
left now looked to Russia, as their predecessors had once looked to
France, for the lead in universal revolution. The Soviet government,
however, was no longer dazzled by the hope of an immediate mil-
lennium. Instead it was working to strengthen Russia as the nucleus
for a still-distant world upheaval, and therefore to enlist Russian na-
tionalism, paradoxically, in the service of an international faith. The

Star of Empire

that violation of any part was violation of the whole. If they had,
the League might have acquired a rigidity to which Britain, among
others, was unalterably opposed. Instead the League remained flac-
cid: the disparity of its members* interests kept them from agreeing,
when the question arose, that any one part of the settlement was
crucial, and fragment after fragment the peace went by default. The
aggressors synchronized their blows, striking now here, now there,
without ever setting in full motion the machinery of sanctions. Ag-
gression was in fact more collective than security, and the League
as a means of preventing war was a reed shaken with the wind.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, the wind mounted rapidly.
Nazism was more than a challenge to "the dictate of Versailles/*
The Nazis began where the extremists of the Second Reich had
broken off in defeat, with the ambition for WeUmacht oder Nieder-
gang, and the destruction of the Versailles settlement was only the
prelude to another bid for world power. The opportunity was
greater than ever before. On the diplomatic side it grew from the
division between Russia and the West, which permitted Hitler to
advance by carefully planned steps, each integrated with all tie
others, none provocative enough to bring on a major conflict before
he was ready. On the military side the opportunity grew, paradoxi-
cally, from Germany's previous defeat: her army and air force had
to be built from almost nothing and were unencumbered by obso-
lete equipment and obsolete thinking, whereas the French and Brit-
ish high commands were saddled with the material and ideas of
1918. For these reasons the second German bid for Weltmacht was
even more dangerous than the first.

The British, however, found it much more difficult to grasp. They
had never understood the character of German nationalism, and
the collective Nazi psychosis seemed unbelievable. They had long
been eager for German recovery; when it came, with phenomenal
speed, they were slow to realize what it meant. Hitler had no im-
mediate designs on their security and did not press, as the Kaiser
had done, upon their nerves of empire; his interest was elsewhere.
The vision of power that beckoned him "was essentially land-bound,
like Napoleon's, and it turned his eyes eastward. There only was the
space upon which his thousand-year Reich could be built. For the
sake of eastern expansion he renounced the traditional German aims
that had most antagonized Great Britain. **We National Socialists

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Star of Empire

Among them the most prominent was Churchill. He had the insight
to read the signs abroad and the political hardihood to proclaim
what he read; for years he was the Cassandra of government, and
the theme of his prophecies was the terrible warning of Burke on
the eve of an earlier imperial catastrophe: "a great empire and little
minds go ill together/* Churchill remained barred from office for the
very reason that he saw too clearly.

The minds of the successive leaders of the National Government
-were not much larger than those of the voters. MacDonald reflected
the pacifism of the Labour Party, and during his last years in office
his physical strength was ebbing as rapidly as his political. Baldwin,
for all his wit and shrewdness, had little taste for foreign affairs and
no proclivity for the strong line; the measure of his vision was his
warning that Britain's frontier was on the Rhine an understate-
ment that the public refused to believe and on which he himself
failed to act. By the time he retired in 1937, the wind had been well
sown.

The man who reaped the 'whirlwind was Joseph Chamberlain's
son, who had little except Birmingham in common with his father.
Neville Chamberlain had no religion of empire, and he was any-
thing but a radical. He had made his name at the Exchequer and re-
tained the rationalism of the financier the confidence in an in-
ternational order founded upon laws that bind even statesmen, the
incomprehension of economic and political fanaticism, the belief
that common sense must ultimately prevail. He was neither a fool
nor a coward, but a competent and self-confident administrator, as
wedded as Sir Robert Walpole to the ways of peace. He was con-
fronted by masters of undeclared war, and he was no more capable
than the nation at large of understanding their motives and methods.

These, then, were some of the reasons behind Britain's foreign
policy in the 1930's. On the one hand a pervasive mood of retreat
numbed her will to act, and manifold domestic problems distracted
her attention from the storm brewing in Europe. On the other hand
the nature of the storm was peculiarly difficult to grasp; the rise of
new collectivist faiths was incomprehensible to a public bred on
democracy and imbued with the hope of the League, and the spe-
cific menace from Germany was at once too indirect and too novel
to be quickly felt. The nation could not and would not respond to
Churchill. Instead it got Baldwin and Chamberlain, and to blame

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cogent argument against estranging Italy in the face of the German
menace. But the argument on the other side was equally cogent:
the cause of collective security had suddenly become identified with
Britain's security at Suez, the defense of a great ideal with the de-
fense of her immediate interests; this was the time, if ever, for her
to insist on implementing the covenant even at the risk of war. Be-
tween these two logical courses of action the government wobbled
irresolutely. First the fleet was concentrated at the ends of the Medi-
terranean; then an agreement was reached with Italy and promptly
repudiated; then the League imposed ineffectual sanctions; then the
Italians completed their conquest, and the whole matter was
dropped.

Meanwhile Hitler struck. In March of 1936, at the height of the
Ethiopian crisis, he sent troops into the Rhineland. This flagrant vio-
lation of Versailles and Locarno was timed to perfection. The Brit-
ish were too busy in the Mediterranean to be greatly disturbed that
Germans had reoccupied German territory. The French saw more
clearly, but they dared not fight without the certainty of British
support. Their will to resist 'was sapped by Britain's reluctance, just
as their reluctance was sapping her will to fight Mussolini; neither
of the partners had the vision to see the other's interests or the reso-
lution to act alone. Their post-war entente had reached its nadir,
and the dictators profited accordingly.

Hitler's first step in immobilizing France was to control the Rhine-
land. His second was to fortify it, in order to preclude an attack
from the West when he turned eastward. As his fortifications pro-
gressed, the strength went out of French influence in central and
eastern Europe. The building of the Maginot Line had already
shown that France intended to await attack if war came, and Hitler's
new defenses made assurance doubly sure. The French satellites in
the east began to lose hope of effective aid, and their will to resist
Hitler's demands was proportionately weakened.

Britain's failure in Ethiopia had equally serious repercussions.
She antagonized Mussolini as the French had feared, and in 1936
he made the pact known as the Rome-Berlin Axis. This step was a
more fundamental reorientation of Italian policy than the Triple
Alliance had been because it envisaged, as the alliance had not, a
possible clash with Britain. Mussolini had been encouraged by his
Ethiopian gamble to defy the long-established axiom that Italy, with

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tains, so as to incorporate into the Reich the Germans of the area.
Their position had been drastically altered by the peace settlement,
which had changed them from representatives of the Herrenvolk in
Vienna to an alien minority governed from Prague. If they wished
to be part of the new Germany, had the Czechs or the French or
the British the right to gainsay them? The principle of self-determi-
nation was again being turned against the democracies.

As the crisis developed, leadership devolved increasingly upon
London; two years of waiting on British support seemed to have
deprived Paris of the 'will to independence. In Britain Hitler's argu-
ment had an insidious appeal. It seemed to be based on justice, and
it was backed by fleets of bombers. The nation was by now fully
awake to the air menace, and the shock of waking produced a mood
nearer to panic than at any other moment of recent history. The
mood may or may not have been justified; it was the setting in
which the government had to work. Chamberlain was convinced,
along with the bulk of the British people, that war would be cata-
strophic for every one, including the Czechs; he believed that Hitler
could be induced to compromise, and would observe whatever
agreement might be reached. On these assumptions he negotiated.

Hitler steadily raised his terms, until even Chamberlain lost hope
and broke off negotiations. Tension and fear grew almost unbear-
able; then came the sudden invitation to a conference at Munich.
Hitler's psychology was masterful. His last-minute offer unloosed
such a flood of popular relief and rejoicing that Chamberlain and
the French Premier were not in a bargaining position by the time
they reached Munich; they could no longer risk war over matters
of detail, and the sum of their detailed concessions gave Hitler more
than he had initially demanded. Czechoslovakia, without a shot
fired, lost her defensible frontier. This was the agreement that
Chamberlain hailed, in one of the most unfortunate quotations of
modern history, as "peace with honor."

In the sixty years since Disraeli had applied the phrase to the
Treaty of Berlin, Britain's prestige had sunk even more dramatically
than her power. In 1878 she had extorted a settlement by the threat
of force; it had been peace, whether honorable or not. In 1938 she
yielded to the threat of force. Even Chamberlain must have doubted
that the result was peace (for he accelerated the tempo of rearma-
ment), and he could scarcely have considered it honorable. Al-

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to reverse their choice a year later in favor of Stalin, they had
little to offer him. He wished to re-establish Russian influence in
the territories lost in the peace settlement, if only to resist a Ger-
man attack; this they could not condone without violating the very
principle of self-determination for which they were ready to go to
war. He naturally doubted their readiness. They had not fought for
their own immediate interests, or for a treaty obligation to the
Czechs; why should they do so for the Poles? If they did not, Russia
might be involved alone; if they did, they were planning a defen-
sive so static that it would leave her to bear the brunt of the on-
slaught. She had a vital interest in stopping Hitler, but none in
aiding the democracies. If Germany turned against them instead of
against her, she would have at least a breathing space. These con-
siderations, superimposed upon decades of distrust, seem to have
determined Soviet policy.

Agreement with Germany was more attractive. If the two powers
partitioned the weak states between them, the Kremlin may well
have argued, Russia would at worst gain space with which to cush-
ion a German attack; the Nazi move into Poland would precipitate,
if Britain and France honored their commitments, a European war
in which Russia's enemies might destroy one another and pave the
way for world revolution. Late in August Stalin came to terms with
Hitler: two complete cynics contracted a manage de convenance,
and out of it came the second World War.

Hitler demanded that Poland cede much of the Corridor, for the
threadbare reason that it was populated by Germans. The Poles re-
fused to take the road the Czechs had traveled, and Chamberlain
refused to force them; Britain was preparing to honor her guarantee,
and France was reluctantly following her lead. Hitler's diplomacy
could no longer win him bloodless triumphs. It had immobilized his
Western enemies strategically, but in the process it had goaded
them into challenging him on an issue they were powerless to affect.
To the challenge he had only one reply. On September 1 he invaded
Poland, and two days later Britain and France declared war.

The mood of the British public was wholly different from that of
1914. No one expected a short or romantic war; the flags and music
and shouting were gone. Instead mothers and children were being
evacuated from the great cities in a migration directed by the
ubiquitous, impersonal voice of the radio; gas masks had been dis-

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airplane and the tank, could now be integrated by radio into a strik-
ing force that could cut through the formerly impenetrable complex
of barbed wire, trenches, and machine guns. Static defense was ob-
solete. This the Germans realized far more clearly than their West-
ern enemies. For generations blitzkrieg had been the focus of Ger-
man military thought; Nazism provided th6 climate for a strategy
unencumbered by caution or moderation, and the German army and
air force were fused into the most effective tactical instrument the
world had seen. Hitler knew that he could not be contained. His in-
activity in the West merely covered his preparations.

His first move was unexpected. In April 1940 German troops oc-
cupied Denmark and landed in Norway, partly to forestall the Brit-
ish and partly to gain greater access to the North Sea. A Franco-
British expeditionary force, hurried to the aid of the Norwegians,
was routed by the Nazis, and the completeness of the defeat shocked
the British public. The Prime Minister was the victim: Chamberlain
gave place to Churchill. Out of a relatively minor setback the nation
acquired such a leader as it had not had since the eighteenth cen-
tury.

In many ways Churchill was the child of that century. His appe-
tite for experience, however bitter or painful, and his sense of his
country's imperial mission belonged more to the exuberant Whigs of
the Hanoverian era than to the nervous Tories of the National Gov-
ernment. But his genius for leadership was timeless. Few men have
been as richly endowed with it by nature and training. His will-
ingness to accept responsiblity had grown into a craving for it by
the time he came to Downing Street, and his insight had been sharp-
ened by long experience. If his vision, for all its magnificent clarity,
was limited by old preconceptions of Britain's place in the world,
its very limitation was part of his greatness for the job in hand. He
personified the proud tradition of Cromwell and the Pitts, Canning
and Disraeli; he believed in the British people implicitly and fear-
lessly because he was pervaded by a sense of their victorious past.
So were they, at bottom, and in the hour of trial they drew from that
sense a courage to match his own.

Their trial began the moment he took office. On May 10 Hitler
launched his main offensive in the West It poured into neutral
Belgium, and this time engulfed Holland as well. The Schlieffen
Plan was apparently being tried again; the enemy advance hinged

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it, "seems to be, "Thank God we've no more allies to let us down!' "
Such a people could be defeated in battle but not in spirit, and
Churchill's grim eloquence gave voice to their determination. Un-
deterred by their meager resources, they prepared methodically to
repel invasion. The same lack of imagination that had made them
shortsighted became their source of strength in calamity. Now that
they had everything to fear, they were unafraid.

Others feared for them, and particularly in Washington. There
the prospect of their defeat clarified, as nothing else could have
done, the American stake in their survival. The United States was
confronted by grave dangers both from Europe and from Asia. The
naval position in the Atlantic was worse than at the beginning of
1917 because the threat was more acute: if Britain fell, and espe-
cially if the Germans captured substantial portions of her fleet, the
United States might be forced back from the defense of South
America to the inner line of the Caribbean. And to the naval eye
Britain's fall looked imminent. Her battle fleet had less than half as
many capital ships as in 1916; much of its strength had to be con-
centrated in the Mediterranean to hold Suez against the Italians,
and commerce was driven to the long detour around South Africa.
The losses in the Norwegian campaign and in the evacuation from
Dunkirk, followed by the defection of the French navy, had pro-
duced a shortage of light units for anti-submarine patrol; the Ger-
mans were using U-boat bases in France for an offensive that soon
ranged to tie mid-Atlantic, and even their surface raiders could
no longer be contained. The Royal Navy, in short, lacked the where-
withal to safeguard the home islands. If invasion or bombing did
not reduce them, starvation was likely to do so.

President Roosevelt, like Churchill, had the great advantage of a
training in the ways of sea power. He saw the scope of the danger,
and he acted fast. In the destroyer deal of September 1940 the
United States gave Britain fifty ancient but still serviceable destroy-
ers, a gift the Royal Navy might once have scorned but now desper-
ately needed. In return Britain took the unprecedented step of leas-
ing to the United States bases within the empire, and so entrusting
her "with the defense of Anglo-American interests from Brazil to
Newfoundland. Thus the American government, aware of the na-
tion^ stake in the British Empire, abandoned strict neutrality in
order to decrease the chance of a British collapse and, if it came, to

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erations, the requisite shipping, and above all a battle fleet. Could
the Luftwaffe serve instead, to destroy the Royal Navy and clear
the path? Not, certainly, until the navy had been deprived of air
cover by elimination of the Royal Air Force. The first prerequisite
for conquest was victory in the air.

That victory was not achieved. The Battle of Britain, in the sum-
mer and early autumn of 1940, was as decisive as the Battle of the
Marne; it destroyed Germany's best chance of winning the war.
The Royal Air Force was a new creation, newer even than the Luft-
waffe, and in its planes particularly the Spitfire it had a qualita-
tive advantage; the lag in rearmament that had brought Britain to
the edge of disaster now stood her in good stead. So did her last-
minute development of radar and the fact that the Luftwaffe had
been designed primarily for co-operation with ground forces rather
than for strategic bombing. The Nazis lost so heavily in daylight
raids that they were forced to substitute the more haphazard, and
therefore slower, policy of night attacks. British cities took terrible
punishment from fire and high explosives. But the courage of the
many matched that of the few; civilians fought on the ground as
stubbornly as the pilots of the R. A. F., and between them they won
the battle.

The German failure scotched the invasion plan and thereby
opened the way for Hitler's first great error. For the past five years
he had gone from triumph to triumph, and by a skill as consummate
as Bismarck's he had avoided the specter of a war on two fronts.
Now his intuition produced strategic fumbling. Common prudence
dictated reducing Britain to impotence before embarking on further
adventures. If she could not be invaded or brought to terms by
bombing, she could be crippled in the Mediterranean by an attack
through Spain on Gibraltar, by helping the Italians to capture Suez,
by a drive through the Balkans and Turkey to open the Middle East.
Yet instead of reaching for the prize at hand, Hitler determined to
attack Russia.

This colossal blunder was the triumph of Mein Kampf over strate-
gic sense. Hitler had preached for so long that communism repre-
sented the plot of "the international Jew" to dominate the world,
and that Russia blocked Germany's territorial needs, that he seems
to have become the dupe of his own preaching. By the autumn of
1940 he decided to turn eastward before destroying Britain's posi-

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time, like the first, she was driven by the logic of self-defense. "God
helping her, she can do no other."

For Japan the Russo-German war brought the climax of oppor-
tunity. The need to supply Russia kept the British navy busier than
ever in European waters; the American navy, also engaged in the
Atlantic, was not strong enough to safeguard Anglo-Saxon interests
on the other side of the world. Russia was the only land power that
might oppose Japanese designs, and she was fighting for her life in
the West. Japan saw in the German tanks pouring down the roads
to Moscow the means of establishing her own hegemony in the Far
East. When the United States government refused to capitulate to
her demand for hegemony, war became inevitable. It grew out of
the war in Europe by the noxious logic of aggression, which led
from Poland to France to Russia to Pearl Harbor.

When Japan struck in December, she neutralized the principal
force in her way. Whether the United States battle fleet could have
impeded her early conquests is doubtful, but with that fleet crippled
her way was clear. Britain's land power in Asia was inadequate, like
American power in the Philippines, and her inability to defend her
vast holdings was published to the world in the Singapore cam-
paign. For the first time since the American Revolution she lost
substantial portions of her empire. As the Japanese advanced in a
matter of months to the coast of Austrialia and the Indian frontier,
the ghost of the Pax Britannica was finally laid to rest.

This disaster ended an era in the history of the Commonwealth.
All the dominions except Eire were in the war, and their military
support was at least as valuable as it had been a generation earlier.
In the Pacific, however, it was support primarily for the United
States. She assumed, for Australia and New Zealand, the role the
mother country abandoned at the fall of Singapore. Canada was
equally within the American orbit. Her coasts were protected at
short range by American bases, from Iceland to Virginia and from
the Aleutians to San Pedro, and at long range by the fleet operating
from Pearl Harbor as much as by that operating from Scapa Flow;
the extension to her of the Monroe Doctrine was mere recognition
of accomplished fact. Commonwealth and American affairs were
also, in Churchill's understatement, "somewhat mixed up together."

The war into which the United States was precipitated had only
one great land front. The Russian armies had confounded the

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was a major factor (Italy, in the event, scarcely qualified). In con-
sequence the floating and flying strength of the United States fleet
soon far outstripped that of the Royal Navy. In terms of the seven
seas, as of so much else, the war dramatized before its end the shift
from British to American predominance.

In the autumn of 1942 the allies wrenched the initiative from the
Axis. In the Pacific the Solomon Islands campaign began the Ameri-
can offensive that ended three years later in Tokyo Bay. In North
Africa the British advance from Egypt and the Anglo-American
landings in French Morocco and Algeria caught the Axis forces in
a pincers that closed over some two thousand miles; Hitler refused
to evacuate his troops, and by May 1943 he had lost them all and
with them Africa. Meanwhile he had refused to withdraw before
the Russian counterattack at Stalingrad and had sacrificed a quarter-
million men. These defeats, after the losses of two years in Russia,
blunted the striking power of his armies and forced the recruitment
of men from the satellite states and even from prisoners of war.
With their polyglot force the Nazis prepared to defend "fortress Eu-
rope" against the Anglo-American assault.

For breaching the fortress two bases were available, North Africa
and the British Isles. From Africa an offensive might be launched
against what Churchill described as "the soft underbelly of the
Axis. 77 In his eyes the conquest of Italy, followed by a drive into
the Balkans, offered great rewards. Although his government had
concluded a twenty-year alliance with Russia, he did not trust her;
he was anxious to establish Anglo-American influence in Eastern
Europe on the rock of armed occupation. But to mount the major
invasion from Africa would prolong the war, because Hitler's em-
pire had no "soft underbelly." Its vitals were protected by bone
and cartilege of mountain the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the
Alps and their Balkan outworks. Nowhere in southern Europe was
there terrain for the rapid, large-scale maneuvers by which the
German army in the West could be engaged and destroyed.

Only one accessible part of the Continent had the space required
the great coastal plain that stretches from the Bay of Biscay to
Denmark and beyond. The British Isles, and not North Africa,
therefore had to be the chief base of operations. The point of attack
in the plain was largely determined by the need for air support and
by logistics: the success of an invasion would hinge upon cover

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Hitler had prepared after 1936. There and in the Low Countries
they stabilized their line.

Their strategic position was hopeless. The Eastern Front was
crumbling before the Russians, and long resistance in the West was
out of the question. Hitler had little interest in playing for time;
with him the concept of Weltmacht oder Niedergang was carried
into strategy. In December a desperate Nazi drive was contained in
the Battle of the Bulge, where the last elements of German offen-
sive strength were destroyed and victory was brought nearer. By
spring the Western Front disintegrated, the Russians reached Berlin,
and Hitler committed suicide. In May came the final surrender of
troops that were no longer an army.

Britain then turned, for the first time since the fall of Singapore,
to the war in the Far East. But there the strategic decision had al-
ready been reached. The American offensive across the Pacific, start-
ing in the Solomons almost three years before, had cut the Japanese
Empire in two by the reconquest of the Philippines, and had
brought air power within effective range of Japan's home islands.
Her air force had gone the way of the Luftwaffe, and her cities were
being devastated. She had virtually no fleet after the battle for the
Philippines. Her merchant shipping had been sunk or forced into
harbor by the submarine blockade. Her government was in as hope-
less a situation as Hitler's a year before, and the only question was
whether it would face, as he had done, the irretrievable ruin of
invasion. When Russia entered the war ruin came nearer; on Au-
gust 6 the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima brought the threat
of obliteration. The government was still sane, and it surrendered.

V The New World

THE LONG ordeal was over, and the tide of hope set in. The fact
that hope has ebbed again does not prove that it was unjustified.
The organization of the United Nations during the war provided a
framework for world order sufficiently strong to secure the peace
if the member states would co-operate. No constitutional form can
do more, just as no wedding service can ensure a successful mar-
riage. .The charter of the United Nations gave the nations oppor-
tunity, and in 1945 there was reason to hope that they would
grasp it.

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States. Each of the others was free to criticize and amend, however,
and to initiate policy on matters of peculiar concern to itself, pro-
vided that it secured general agreement; the proviso was imple-
mented by the need for support. This arrangement was informal
and flexible, without benefit of treaty or covenant; it existed in fact
more than in law. But it worked.

Its working was evidence of an underlying accord that had long
been growing. In the nineteenth century the United States had
been sheltered by British power, but in the twentieth her own be-
gan to replace it. At the same time Britain was conceding independ-
ence to the dominions and forming with them a league so loosely
knit that its fabric was altered, but not torn, by the emerging force
of America. As early as the first World War the United States was
closely associated with the Commonwealth, and already she was be-
coming less a danger to it than a source of strength. The English-
speaking peoples were unconsciously ending the political schism
begun in 1775 and confirmed in 1812. The second World War deep-
ened and matured their association, and trained them for working
together to build the peace.

Their chance of building an immediate and stable peace was slim,
despite all the high hopes. Two major factors stood in the way. In
the first place the war had razed the pre-existing international struc-
ture more completely than at any time in modern history, and had
concentrated power in the three great victors, Britain, the United
States, and the Soviet Union; between them in Asia and Europe
was a power vacuum, and on their agreement everything depended.
In the second place Russia, whose power inevitably filled much of
the vacuum, did not desire agreement. These factors largely de-
termined Britain's position in the postwar world.

In the Far East the former colonial status quo had been washed
away in the tide of Japanese conquest. The white man's return did
not give him back his face; all southeastern Asia was seething with
native unrest, and the British, French, and Dutch could not rebuild
their old dominions. India had played an increasing part in the war
as it reached her frontiers, and her nationalism had risen accord-
ingly; with the world's largest volunteer army, a million and a quar-
ter men, she patently had the means to assert her independence.
China had become an even more important belligerent, with the
courtesy title of a great power; although she was again torn by civil

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Britain and the United States had virtually conceded this frontier
when they had determined, on military grounds, to crush the west-
ernmost German armies before invading the Reich to win their
victory in installments rather than to race for Berlin. The scope of
their concession, masked for a time by the strength of their armies
in Germany, appeared as soon as they began to demobilize. Be-
tween the Soviet frontier and the British Isles was a helpless Europe,
and Britain by herself lacked the economic and military strength to
counterbalance Russia. The United States was forced to continue
her intervention as the only alternative to Soviet dominance and the
only way to make recovery possible in western Europe.

For it soon became clear that the Soviet government was opposed
to recovery. It had to be, or betray the cause. Economic chaos offers
the eventual means of destroying capitalism and bringing in the mil-
lennium, and only traitors in the Kremlin would work with the West
to avert that consummation. A depressed and powerless Europe, fur-
thermore, serves the immediate aim of increasing Russian power and
facilitating the spread of communism. In this respect Stalin is akin
to Philip II, who saw in the aggrandizement of Spain the triumph of
the Roman Church, and communist methods derive from an attitude
of mind in some ways similar to that of the early Jesuits the belief
in a transcendent goal, in elastic ways of reaching it, and above all
in the determination of truth by infallible authority. If Moscow
"teaches that what appears to us as black is white," as Loyola said
of the Church, "we must go out and preach it white immediately .**
After 1945 Moscow taught that the Anglo-American effort to re-
habilitate Europe was a cloak for imperialism, and the communists
preached accordingly.

A second battle for Europe began, between the victors in the
previous one, and no end is in sight. To Great Britain and the United
States a viable Europe offers the only hope of preserving their own
way of life; for the Kremlin it spells defeat. In consequence the
second World War, unlike all the other great Continental wars of
the past four centuries, has ended without producing a settlement.
The struggle between Russia and the West has disunited the United
Nations, which should have been the forum for settlement, and dis-
appointed the high hopes raised by its charter.

For Britain that struggle is part of an old story, far older than
communism. The Soviet threat is graver than the czarist, partly be-

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has been based for centuries, and does so just when her world posi-
tion and her social structure are also in metamorphosis.

The war strained her national economy to the breaking point.
Her industrial plant was worked unceasingly and much o its equip-
ment worn out; almost half a million houses were war casualties; a
large fraction of her merchant marine was sunk, and overseas in-
vestments were liquidated to meet the cost of survival. After the
fighting ended she found herself unable to pay for the raw materials
to revivify her manufactures, and for the food to live on, except by
curtailing her political and military commitments throughout the
world. This disastrous possibility was averted by an American loan,
but her root difficulties remain. The Industrial Revolution, which
raised her to a pinnacle after 1815, has in this century dropped her
slowly but inexorably into a slough. With an old plant battered by
two wars she can no longer make a respectable living, let alone
amass the capital to modernize her plant. This is the crux of her
dilemma, and for it no permanent solution has yet appeared.

The ebbing of her economic power has been matched by an
ebbing of imperial power. The dominions, with the exception of
Eire, proved their loyalty in the second war even more strikingly
than in the first. But Britain's traditional return for loyalty, im-
perial defense, was no longer within her capacity. Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand took over their own protection under the aegis of
American sea power, and South Africa was beholden to no one;
only Eire, ironically enough, still depended on the Royal Navy.
Elsewhere in the empire the same ebb tide has been more notice-
able. It has taken the British from Burma, Ceylon, and Palestine,
and above all from India. Before the end of the war the maturing
of Hindu and Moslem nationalism destroyed the fabric of British
rule, which for two hundred years had rested on native loyalty and
crumbled with its f oundation. After long hesitance the British gov-
ernment bowed to the facts, and India became two independent
dominions. Once more Britain accommodated herself to the medi-
ocrity of her circumstances.

For at least half a century the world has been witnessing the de-*
dine of the British Empire. The process has had many aspects
economic decline at the center, political decline as the dominions
have grown in numbers and independence, military decline with
the reduction of the Royal Navy from supremacy to second rank,

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they showed either ingratitude or vision, depending on the point of
view. They certainly showed a boldness to match the gravity of their
crisis. The Labour program is far more than the nationalization of
industries; it reaches into every corner of British life. It rejects al-
most all the traditional liberal premises except the Bill of Rights,
and endeavors to reconcile individual political freedom with an
omnicompetent state. It involves rigid control of producers and
consumers in the interest of the national welfare as interpreted by
Whitehall, and at a time of grim austerity it demands the extension
of social services beyond the fondest dreams of the pre-war years.
It aims at leveling the disparity between rich and poor by stringent
taxation, so that even modest fortunes disappear into the Ex-
chequer. The result is that the state must sooner or later take over
financial responsibility for hospitals, schools and universities, chari-
ties, art galleries, in short the whole field of private endowment.

These measures are not in essence new. The welfare state was
foreshadowed by the Liberals after 1906; they also experimented
gingerly with the egalitarian use of the taxing power, and the post-
war Conservatives improved on their example. Socialism, in other
words, is not a break with recent British history, but the culmina-
tion of trends apparent for at least four decades. Its novelty is less
in its ideas than in the thoroughness, even ruthlessness, with which
they are being applied.

Neither is socialism a peculiarly British experience. Since the de-
pression most democracies, including the United States, have enor-
mously tightened state controls in the interest of the general welf are
rather than of individual profit. Britain has merely gone farther
than others. She has carried a line of experiment to its logical con-
clusion, and at a critical moment. She is working out a redefinition
of democracy; whatever its merits and demerits, it is of particular
concern to the peoples of western Europe. For it offers them a mid-
dle road between communism, which they distrust, and the con-
servative, capitalistic democracy of the pre-war years, with which
they are disillusioned. The British still have the vitality and re-
silience for political pioneering, although few would have guessed
it a decade ago, and their exploration may reanimate the democratic
spirit.

386

Star of Empire

ians, and after 1941 their techniques were turned against them; the
American incendiary raids on Japan and the allied bombing of Ger-
many would have been atrocities in 1918, and the explosion over
Hiroshima jolted even the world of 1945. War is now hell, to a de-
gree of which Sherman never dreamed. To wage it at all is to wage
it without scruple, and Britain and the United States are inured to
laying aside their scruples for the duration.

This amoral attitude toward power is particularly dangerous in
an era that promises ceaseless international friction, but it is not yet
the dominant attitude. Anglo-American democracy has in its mar-
row a sense of compromise between opposing forces. War has been
a temporary recourse where compromise failed, and the communist
idea of war against a way of life is alien to the democratic tradition.
Although both Britain and the United States have fought civil wars,
the basic issues have been resolved less by battle than by later
peaceful adjustment. Although both have fought wars of aggrandize-
ment in achieving their empires, the present status of India, Egypt,
and South Africa, of Cuba and the Philippines, indicates that ag-
grandizement has in the long run been no match for the spirit of
compromise. The more ruthless war becomes in its techniques and
the more total in its scope, the more antithetical it is to that spirit.
The two cannot co-exist much longer. If the spirit is tough enough
to survive, it will do so by evading and eventually by eliminating
war.

The task may be beyond human power. But the English-speaking
peoples have a strong incentive to try it; their whole way of life is
at stake. Ever since the days of the Elizabethans their society has
developed and spread overseas within a cushion of sea power that
has protected it against a sudden blow. They have been able to
dispense with militarism in the French or German sense and to pre-
pare for war after war began in short, to be civilian. They have
consequently developed systems of government that minimize co-
ercive force; they have paid heavily when fighting began, but the
surrounding oceans have hitherto given them time to gather their
strength and bring it to bear. The margin of time has been their
salvation. Now it is evaporating. New weapons are making possible
a devastating surprise attack, against which the oceans of the world
may soon be little more defense than the English Channel. This

388

Star of Empire

with the latest weapons. If the Soviet Union acquired such control
tomorrow, the urban centers of the British Isles might be devastated
by guided missiles. Anglo-American air power, even when armed
with atomic bombs, would presumably furnish means of retaliation
more than of defense. If London or the Midlands were destroyed,
the prospect of being revenged would be cold comfort for the
dead.

Another contemporary development in the art of slaughter, bac-
teriological warfare, is perhaps even more disturbing. Its potentiali-
ties in a close-packed island population are peculiarly hideous, and
the medical defensive is still problematical. But if these threats are
grim, they are trifles by comparison with those that impend now
that atomic explosives are no longer an Anglo-Saxon monopoly. The
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent tests at
Bikini, have terrifying implications for every state in the world. For
Britain they are catastrophic.

The obvious aspect of the atomic bomb is its explosive power,
against which the only present defense is the dispersion of industries
and people. Dispersion requires not merely a vast refashioning of so-
ciety but also physical space. Britain does not have the space. Of
all the great powers she is the smallest, the most concentrated, and
therefore the most vulnerable. The other aspect of the bomb is
equally important. It generates a poison that is most effectively
spread, as the second test at Bikini showed, by the cloud of vapor
from an underwater explosion. To this form of attack Britain is
particularly vulnerable. She depends upon the sea more completely
than any other great power, and her chief industrial areas are within
a hundred miles of the west coast, from which comes the prevailing
wind. Bombs might be planted by saboteurs, laid as mines by sub-
marines, delivered by plane and presumably by rocket; and the de-
tonation of a single one might have paralyzing effects. The danger
has the quality of nightmare. But it promises to be, before long, the
waking nightmare of Britain's military planners. Her "water-walled
bulwark"' is becoming a death trap.

If this analysis is sound, the problem of her defense appears in-
soluble. The soundest defense would be to attack to strike the
first blow without warning, in order to cripple the antagonist at the
start and so preclude retaliation. Such a "preventive" war, when
both sides have atomic bombs in quantity, would be at best a des-

390

Star of Empire

resources are waning, Her political vitality seems once more to be
waxing. She will need it all in the years to come, and it will have
to be matched with wisdom. Failure will mean death. But success
will mean a prouder part in the advance of civilization than even
she has ever played.

394

Bibliographical Note

equal brevity and brilliance, by Herbert A. L. Fisher, A History of
Europe (revised edition; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.; 1939). Esm^
Wingfield-Stratford has endeavored to integrate all the aspects of
Britain's story, from foreign affairs to architecture, in The History of
British Civilization (second edition; New York and London: Har-
court, Brace & Co.; 1930); i his aim is too ambitious to be fully
realized, he is Lively to read and penetrating in many of his com-
ments.

For the sixteenth century Arthur D. Innes, England under the
Tudors (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd.; 1905) is a compendium of
facts enlivened by flashes of insight. For my discussion of Henry
VIII's breach from Rome I have drawn also on James A. Froude,
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Eliza-
beth (12 vols.; second edition; New York: C. Scribner's Sons; 1890).
Two of the most readable and delightful books on the period, both
by outstanding modern authorities, are Conyers Read, The Tudors;
Personalities and Practical Politics in Sixteenth Century England
(New York: Oxford University Press; 1936) and John E. Neale,
Queen Elizabeth (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace & Co.;
1934). The end of the century is covered in great detail by Ed-
ward P. Cheyney, A History of England, from the Defeat of the
Armada to the Death of Elizabeth; with an Account of English In-
stitutions during the Later Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Cen-
turies (2 vols.; New York: Longmans, Green & Co.; 1914-26); the
second volume is by far the best survey I know of Elizabethan local
government.

The outstanding history of the Stuart period is George M. Trevel-
yan, England under the Stuarts (fourteenth edition; London: Me-
thuen & Co., Ltd.; 1928); this book is a masterpiece, to which I am
deeply indebted. A brief but invaluable study of the rise of Parlia-
ment before the Civil Wars is Wallace Notestein, The Winning of
the Initiative by the House of Commons (London: H. Milford, Ox-
ford University Press; 1925). For the Cromwellian period I have
used particularly two major works of Sir Charles Firth, Oliver Crom-
well and the Rule of the Puritans in England (New York: G. P. Put-
nam's Sons; 1900) and CromwelFs Army: a History of the English
Soldier during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protec-
torate (New York and London: Methuen & Co., Ltd.; 1902); a brief
and fascinating essay by the same author is The Parallel between

396

Bibliographical Note

1793-1812 (2 vols.; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1892). Arthur
Bryant, The Years of Endurance, 1793-1802 (New York and Lon-
don: Harper & Brothers; 1942) is a lively and sometimes gossipy
account of Britain in the crisis of the Napoleonic Wars.

For the political story from 1815 to 1886 I have relied heavily on
Sir John A. R. Marriott, England since Waterloo (third edition;
New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons and Methuen and Co.,
Ltd.; 1919). A stimulating survey of the early and late nineteenth
century is Elie Hatevy, A History of the English People [1815-52]
(4 vols.; London: T. F. Unwin; 1924^47) and A History of the Eng-
lish People: Epilogue [1895-1915] (2 vols.; London: E. Benn, Ltd.;
1929-34). The author approaches his subject with the wisdom and
detachment of French scholarship at its best, and the only draw-
back of his monumental work is that it does not cover the whole
period.

For the development of the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries a compact and most convenient text is Paul Knaplund, The
British Empire, 1815-1939 (New York: Harper & Brothers; 1941).
British economic changes in the same period are dealt with (for the
serious student) in sections of Witt Bowden, Michael Karpovitch,
and Alfred P. Usher, An Economic History of Europe since 1750
(New York and Cincinnati: American Book Co.; 1937), and the evo-
lution of political theory in Guido de Ruggiero, The History of Eu-
ropean Liberalism (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press;
1927). No reader should tackle either of these volumes without un-
derstanding that he will have to work hard for his profit. A less ex-
acting book in the field of political theory, and one of particular
value, is Carl A. Bodelsen, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism
(Copenhagen and London: Gyldendal; 1924), in which the author
handles with great lucidity the different English schools of thought
about the empire.

For the nature and results of Britain's military experience in the
first World War I am indebted to the later chapters of Edward M.
Earle (editor), Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press; 1941). For my discussion of the post-war settle-
ment I have drawn on Paul Birdsall, Versailles Twenty Years After
(New York: Reynal & Hitchcock; 1941). Two stimulating commen-
taries on international affairs before and during the second World
War are Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years 9 Crisis 9 1919-1939; an

398

Index

Army (continued)

first World War, 321, 322^-3; be-
tween wars, 358; in second World
War, 367, 369

Army, Indian, 240, 243-4; in crisis of
1878, 279; in second World War,
380

Arthur Tudor, son of Henry VH, mar-
riage and death, of, 16

Articles of religion: see Six Articles;
Thirty-Nine Articles

Asiento, conceded to Britain by Spain
(1713), 121; friction over, 134-S.

Atlantic Pact, 387; potential signifi-
cance, 391

Atomic weapons, first used, 378; im-
plications, 390-1

Austerlitz, Battle of (1805), 193-4

Australia, settlement of, 232-3; in
Boer War, 294; in first World War,
324, 343; after Ottawa Conference,
351; in second World War, 371,
374, 379, 384, 385

Austria, sixteenth-century dynastic al-
liance with Spain, 13, 14; in period
of Louis XIV, 98, 117-21; eight-
eenth-century position of, 134m5,
136-8, 141-2; in Wars of French
Revolution and Napoleon, 176, 181,
182, 188, 193, 197, 199; in Vienna
settlement, 202-5; and concert of
Europe, 206, 207-8; and nine-
teenth-century Turkey, 210, 243;
and Revolutions of 1848, 239; and
Italian question, 242; and Danish
War (1864), 251; and German uni-
fication, 243, 269, and see Austria-
Hungary; in settlement of 1919,
334; annexed by Germany, 363;
overrun by Russia, 381

Austria-Hungary, creation of (1867),
269-70, 276; in crisis of 1878, 279;
and German alliance, 279-80, 301;
and origins of first World War, 314-
6, 317, 318-20; in first World War,
324, 331; extinguished in settle-
ment of 1919, 334, 381

Austrian Succession, War of the
(1740), 134-6

Axis, Rome-Berlin, formed (1936),
362-3; Japanese pact with, 371. See
also Germany, in second World
War

Balance of power, nature of, 13-4; in
Tudor period, 12-4, 16, 18; and

Balance of Power (continued)

Louis XIV, 103-4, 117-9; and
Utrecht settlement (1713), 121-2,
126, 134; and Paris settlement
(1763), 140-1; in Napoleonic era,
189; and Vienna settlement (1815),
201, 202, 204, 231, 276, 381; in
Mediterranean, 212, 241, 243, 270;
and Triple Entente, 313-4; in Eu-
rope of 1920's, 337, 381; in con-
temporary world, 380-2, 383-4

Baldwin, Stanley, and abdication of
Edward VIII, 354-5; and Nazi
menace, 360-1

Balkans, nineteenth-century Austrian
interests in, 205, 243, 269-70, 279-
80; nineteenth-century British in-
terests in, 210-2, 241-3, 278-80;
and origins of first World War, 313,
314-5, 317, 318-20; in first World
War, 324, 331; in second World
War, 371, 372, 373, 376, 381; and
contemporary Anglo-Russian fric-
tion, 383

Baltic Sea, English commerce in, 4;
and German sea power in first
World War, 327-8

Baltic States, during American Revo-
lution, 160; in Napoleonic era, 189,
193; after first World War, 331

Battles: see Austerlitz (1805); Blen-
heim (1704); Boyne (1690); Brit-
ain (1940); Camperdown (1797);
Cape St. Vincent (1797); Copen-
hagen (1801); Dunbar (1650);
Flodden Field (1513); Jutland
(1916); Lexington (1775); Ma-
juba Hill (1881); Marne (1914);
Navarino (1827); Nile (1798);
Quiberon Bay (1759); Saratoga
(1777); Trafalgar (1805); Water-
loo (1815); Worcester (1651);
Yorktown (1781)

Beatty, Admiral Sir David, at Battle
of Jutland, 327

Belgium, separation of, from Kingdom
of Holland (1830), 217; in Franco-
Prussian War, 276; invaded by Ger-
mans (1914), 316, 318, 319-21;
and reparations, 336; French alli-
ance with, 340; and Locarno treat-
ies, 340-1; invaded by Germans
(1940), 368-3

Berlin, Congress and Treaty of,
(1878), 279-80, 293, 364; and Bos-
nian crisis (1908), 314

11

Index

Burke, Edmund (continued)

peachment o Hastings, 166-7; on
French Revolution, 177-8, 180; on
imperial ties, 238, 346; mentioned,
244

Bute, John Stuart, Earl of, and Peace
of Paris (1763), 141-2

Byron, George Gordon, Baron, and
Greek revolt, 211

Cabinet: British, in early Hanoverian
period, 130-2, 141, 152, 154, 165-
6, and crisis of 1914, 318, 320, re-
organized during first World War,
325; Canadian, and responsible
government, 235

Calais, English acquisition of, 4; loss
of, 33; Armada at, 43; German
drive toward (1915), 321

Calvinism, and English Puritanism,
36-8; in Scotland, 39, 44, 51; in the
Netherlands, 41; in Ireland, 57-8;
of the Boers, 235, 290. See also
Kirk of Scotland; Presbyterianism,
Puritanism

Camperdown, Battle of, (1797), 183,
193

Canada, French settlements in, 58,
133; British attacks on, 136, 139-
40; British acquisition of, 141-4,
150; during American Revolution,
158, threatened by United States,
162, 198, 234, 235, 262, 277; de-
velopment of, in early-Victorian
period, 232, 234r^, 236, 263; in
Boer War, 294; and imperial pro-
tection, 299; in first World War,
343; and abrogation of Anglo-Jap-
anese alliance, 342; after Ottawa
Conference, 351; in second World
War, 374, 375, 379, 384, 385

Canning, George, foreign policy of,
208-9, 210; death, 211, 214; fol-
lowers of (Canningites), 239, 245;
mentioned, 368

Cape Colony, acquired by Britain
(1815), 204; growth, 232; and
Great Trek, 236-7; and Zulu dan-
ger, 284; and Boer War, 289, 291,
292, 293

Cape St. Vincent, Batde of, (1797),
183, 193, 328

Capitalism, in early Tudor period, 11-
2; and abolition of monasteries, 22;
and economic position of late-Eliza-
bethan England, 47-8; and .growth

Capitalism (continued)

of science, 146-7; and Industrial
Revolution, 171-2, 173-4, 274; and
Boer War, 289-92

Caribbean, HaHuyt on colonies near,
47; Cromwellian concern with, 91
2; eighteenth-century rivalries in,
133-4, 142, 159, 160-1; in Napo-
leonic era, 190, 191-2; United States
interests in, 281, 303, 370

Carlyle, Thomas, on chartism, 224;
on second Reform Bill, 253; Ger-
man influence on, 272-3

Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of
George IV, 213-4

Castiereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount,
and concert of Europe, 206-7;
death, 208, 214, 221; mentioned,
252

Catholic emancipation, and Grattan's
reform movement, 163--4; and Act
of Union, 186-8; and crisis of 1829,
214^6, 2,45; compared with Home
Rule movement, 264; effect on Ul-
ster, 266

Cavalier Parliament: see Parliament,
Cavalier

Cavaliers, composition of, in first Civil
War, 79-80; characteristics of, 80-
2, 87; in second Civil War, 85; re-
turn of, from exile with Charles II,
98; attitude toward Restoration
Church, 103; relationship to later
Tories, 105-6; mentioned, 112

Ceylon, acquired by Britain (1815),
204; British withdrawal from, 384

Chamberlain, Joseph, and Liberal
schism of 1886, 267-8, 299; and
Salisbury, 268, 295-6; and Boer
War, 292-3; on "Teutonic race,"
295; and protection, 29&-9, 309,
350; compared with his son, 360

Chamberlain, Neville, compared with
Walpole, 135; foreign policy of,
354, 360-1, 364-6; resignation, 368

Charles I, King of England, as Prince
of Wales, 59-60; and breach with
Parliament, 617; character, 64, 76,
86, 99; and Laudianism, 65, 70-3;
economic and financial policies, 69
70; in Puritan Revolution, 73-87;
mentioned, 52, 113, 151, 154, 174,
218

Charles H, King of England, with
Scots in second Civil War, 88-9;
restoration of, 95; character, 98-9;

Index

Common law, courts of, and James I,
55-6, 57; and ship money, 70; ten-
ure of judges of, 77, 113; late-Vic-
torian reform of, 259, 260

Commons, House of: .see House of
Commons

Commonwealth, Cromwellian, 89-91,
92-4

Commonwealth of Nations, British,
foreshadowed in eighteenth cen-
tury, 150; embryonic in Victorian
era, 231-8, 380; creation of, 343-4,
346; and Ottawa Conference, 350-
1; and Crown, 354-5; and Eire,
355; and collaboration with United
States in second World War, 374,
379-80; in contemporary world,
384-5, 387, 392

Communism, and eighteenth-century
rationalism, 146; and Russian Rev-
olution, 330, 335; British fear of,
at home, 353; and Russia's position
between wars, 356-7; and Hitler's
attack on Russia, 372; and Russia's
contemporary position, 382, 388,
391-4

Concert of Europe: see Europe, con-
cert of

Congress system after 1815, conflicting
views of, 206-9; collapse of, by
1878, 279; contrasted with League
of Nations, 338

Conscription, first introduced in
France, 182; copied by Prussia and
German Empire, 273; adopted in
Britain (1916), 322-3, and rein-
troduced (1939), 354; reintroduced
in Germany by Hitler, 361

Conservative Party, under Disraeli,
256-7, 259-60; under Salisbury,
265, 287-9, 292-6, 298-9, 300-2,
309, 312; split by protection, 229,
246, 256, 298-9, 305-6; and Liberal
government after 1906, 299-300,
306, 307, 308, 309-10, 311-2, 348;
and coalition of first World War,
325, 345, 348; between World
Wars, 347-50, 353-5, 357. See also
Conservatism; Tory Party.

Conservatism, Burke's theories of, 147,
177-8, 180; Disraeli's theories of,
245-^50; and imperialism, 256-7;
and Fabians, 297

Continental System, of Napoleon I,

194r-9

Contract, freedom of, and classical

Contract (continued)

liberalism, 220; and legalization of
trade unions, 259

Copenhagen, Battle of, (1801), 189,
193

Corn law of 1815, 213; repeal of,
225-9

Cornwallis, Charles, Earl, at York-
town, 151, 160-1,

Cotton manufacture, origins of, 172-
3; and American Civil War, 251

Courts, English: of common law: see
Common law, courts of; preroga-
tive, established by Tudors, 56;
used by Charles I, 69; abolished by
Long Parliament, 77; revived in
Church by James II, 110

Cranmer, Thomas, appointed Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, 21; relations
with Henry VIII, 28-9; in reign of
Edward VI, 30-1; execution, 33

Crete, British expulsion from, (1941),
373; implications, 389

Crimean War (1854), causes and
course, 240-3; psychological effect
of, in Britain, 269; mentioned, 279,
313, 317

Cromwell, Oliver, in Long Parlia-
ment, 78; and New Model, 82-3;
character, 83; in second Civil War,
85-6; problems of his regime, 87,
92-3; settlement of Ireland and
Scotland, 88-9; foreign and im-
perial policy, 90-2; domestic policy,
92-4; compared with Gladstone,
285; mentioned, 113, 142, 164, 224,
225, 235, 368

Cromwell, Richard, ("Tumbledown
Dick"), 94^5

Cyprus, British acquisition of, (1878),
279

Czechoslovakia, creation of, (1919),
334; French alliance with, 340,
363, 365; annexed by Germany,
363-5, 366; overrun by Russia, 381

Dardanelles, in Crimean War, 241; in
crisis of 1878, 281; Anglo-French
attack on, (1915), 324; mentioned,
325, 326, 343

Darwin, Charles, followers of, and
cult of force, 272

Declaration of Indulgence, by Charles
H, 102; by James H, 110

Derby, Edward Stanley, Earl of,
Prime Minister, 253

VI

Index

Entente: Cordiale, formed, 300, 304-
5, extended to Russia, 312--1;
Triple: see Triple Entente

Episcopacy, tinder Henry VIE, 27, 28;
under Elizabeth, 34, 35, 36-8; in
Scotland under James VT, 51, 73;
in England under James 1, 51-3, 55;
under Charles I, 65, 72, 79. See
also Church of England

Erastianism, of Henry VIII, 28, 29;
and Lutheranism, 36; Laudian ad-
herence to, 65; among English Pres-
byterians, 84

Ethiopia, conquered by Italy, 3612;
liberated in second World War,
379

Europe, concert of, and congress sys-
tem, 205-9, 212; collapse of, by
1878, 279; compared with League
of Nations, 208, 338-9

Evangelicalism, and Methodism, 180;
and Victorian liberalism, 217, 230-
1; and missionary movement, 232-
3, 236, 237

Fabianism, its characteristics, 297;
and influence, 298, 349

Fair trade, demand for, (1880's),
274r-5; and Joseph Chamberlain's
program, 298

Fairfax, Thomas, Baron, commander
in chief under Parliament, 83; con-
servatism of, 86, 88

Far East, late nineteenth-century Eu-
ropean rivalries in, 270, 275, 277,
293, 301, 302; affected by first
World War, 317, 326; by Wash-
ington naval agreements, 342; Jap-
anese aggression in, 361, 374-6,
378; in contemporary world, 380-1

Fashoda crisis (1898-9), 288, 292-3,
295, 302, 304

Fenianism, origin and course of move-
ment, 261-2, 277; compared with
Home Rule, 263, 264

Ferdinand of Aragon, mentioned, 13,
16, 17

Flodden Field, Battle of, (1513), 17

Florida, Spanish colonization of, 58;
acquired by Britain (1763), 141;
reacquired by Spain (1783), 161-2

Foch, Ferdinand, in first World War,
331; mentioned, 381

Forced Loan, and antagonism to
Charles I, 62

Fox, Charles James, in American Rev-
olution, 157; and impeachment of
Hastings, 166-7; and George III,
169; Prime Minister, 194

France, medieval relations of, with
England and Scotland, 4-5, 6; ex-
pansion under Valois, 12-13; six-
teenth-century civil wars, 14, 38,
40; relations with Elizabethan Eng-
land and Scotland, 38-40, 45; ex-
pansion in Canada, 58; in Thirty
Years' War, 59-60; relations with
Charles I, 61-2; with Charles H,
98-9, 101-4, 106; and Glorious
Revolution, 103-12, 114, 115; and
English wars of Louis XIV, 116-22,
125, 269; relations with Hanoverian
Britain, 133-44, 148, 175; in Ameri-
can Revolution, 157-62, 164, 166;
during French Revolution and Na-
poleonic Empire, 168, 169, 170,
175-8, 180-200, 282; in Vienna set-
tlement, 202, 203-4, 205-6; and
nineteenth-century Continental lib-
eralism, 204-5; and concert of Eu-
rope, 206, 208-9, 211-2; and Revo-
lution of 1830, 217, and of 1848,
239-40; under Napoleon in, 241-
3, 269, 271, 279; under Third Re-
public, 270, 273, 276, 280, 281-3,
286-9; and origins of first World
War, 300, 301, 304-5, 312-3, 316,
317-9; in first World War, 320-2,
32^-6, 329, 331, 367; in peace set-
tlement (1919), 332, 333, 336, 337,
338-9, 340-1; and origins of second
World War, 358, 359, 361-5; in
second World War, 366-9; effects
of fall of, (1940), 370-4, 382; al-
lied invasion of, 375, 376-7, 382;
in contemporary world, 381

Franchise: in England, in early Tudor
period, 10, in eighteenth-century
boroughs, 129-30, and first Reform
Bill, 218-9, and chartism, 224-5,
and agitation against corn law, 225-
6, Disraeli's views of, 246-8, Glad-
stone's views of, 252, and second
Reform Bill, 253-4, and educational
reform, 258, 261, and third Reform
Bill, 260^1, and role of House of
Commons, 265; in South Africa,
and Uidander problem, 290-3

Francis I, King of France, 17-18

Franco-Prussian War (1870), 270;

Vlll

Index

Grey, Sir Edward, British Foreign
Secretary (1914), 319

Grey, Henry, third Earl, and Cana-
dian self-government, 235

Halduyt, Richard, quoted on coloniza-
tion, 47

Hampton, John, and ship money,
70

Hampton Court Conference (1604),
53

Hanover: Electorate of, allegiance of
George I and George H to, 131, in
British foreign policy, 137-8, 141,
203, 207, alienated from British
Crown (1837), 240; House of, ac-
cession to British throne, 123, 124,
126-7; sovereigns of: see Edward
VH; Edward VHI; George I;
George II; George HI; George IV;
George V; George VI; Victoria;
William IV

Hapsburg, House of, sixteenth-century
dynastic state of, 13, 14, and see
Charles V; possessions of, after
Charles V: see Austria; Austria-
Hungary; Spain; Austro-Spanish
family alliance of, 60-1; and War
of Spanish Succession, 11721;
eighteenth-century dynastic mis-
fortunes of, 134; sovereigns of: see
Charles V; Charles VI; Maria The-
resa; Philip H

Hastings, Warren, career in India and
impeachment, 166-8

Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I,
married, 61j during Puritan Revolu-
tion, 77; and Charles H, 99

Henry VII, King of England, acces-
sion, 7; situation confronting, 112;
reign, 15-7

Henry VIE, King of England, first
marriage, 16-7; reign, 17-24, 27-9,
80

Henry IV, King of France (Henry of
Navarre), 45

Hitler, Adolf, compared with Na-
poleon, 184, 190, 358, 373, and
with Bismarck, 359; abrogation of
Versailles settlement by, 338, 358-
9, 362-6; in second World War,
367-9, 371-3, 376, 378, 381. See
also Nazism

Holland, Kingdom of, created ( 1815),
204; loss of Belgium (1830), 217;
Kaiser's flight to, 331; invaded by

Holland (continued)

Germany (1940), 368-9. See also
Netherlands, Dutch

Holy Roman Empire, Henry VIII as
candidate for emperor of, 17; Na-
poleon's abolition of, (1806), 193

Home Rule, causes and growth of
movement for, 261-8; first Bill,
(1886), 266, 267; second Bill,
(1892), 286-7; third Bill, (1912),
307, 310-2, 318, 320, 345; fourth
Bill, (1920), 345; mentioned, 269,
299

House of Commons, English, in early
Tudor period, 9-11; under Henry
VHI, 18; under Elizabeth, 37, 50;
under James I, 50, 54-5, 59; under
Charles I, 61-7, 74, 75-9, 84, 86;
under Charles II, 99-101, 102-3;
under James H, 110; and settle-
ment of Glorious Revolution, 113,
115-6; under Anne, 124-5; in Han-
overian government, 129-32; and
elder Pitt, 138-9; and George Ill's
experiment, 152-3; under younger
Pitt, 168-70; and Catholic emanci-
pation, 215-6; and first Reform
Bill, 216-9, 221-2; and chartist
program, 224; and repeal of corn
law, 226, 228-9; Disraeli's views of,
247-8, 250; and second Reform
Bill, 253-4; and Home Rule, 264r-5;
emergence of Labour Party in, 298,
307; payment of members, 307;
struggle with House of Lords, 308,
309-10; and crisis of 1914, 318.
See also Parliament; Union, Acts of

House of Lords, English, in early Tu-
dor period, 10; clerical members of,
27; and trial of Strafford, 76-7;
eclipse of, during Puritan Revolu-
tion, 84, 86; packed by Anne, 125;
and first Reform Bill, 221-2, 308;
and repeal of corn law, 229; Dis-
raeli's views of, 247, 250; and re-
form of judiciary, 259; and second
Home Rule Bill, 287, 308; and
legal assault on trade unions, 297
8; and Liberal government after
1906, 308, 309, 310, 311. See also
Parliament

Housman, A. E., quoted, 322

Hudson Bay territory, acquired by
Britain (1713), 121

Hudson River Valley, in American
Revolution, 158, 160

Index

James "III," the Old Pretender, cham-
pioned by Louis XIV, 116, 118, 126;
emotional appeal of, to Tories, 123,
126; and Jacobite risings, 127,
136

James IV, King of Scotland, married
to Margaret Tudor, 16, 17

Jameson Raid (1895), 292

Japan, and revolution of 1867-8, 269;
and war with China (1894), 275;
and British alliance (1902), 300,
303, 317, 326, 341-2; naval com-
petition with Britain, 303, 341-2;
war with Russia (1904), 305, 313;
gains in Versailles settlement, 335;
and Washington naval treaties, 341
2; economic competition with Brit-
ain, 347, 351; and nationalism, 356;
in second World War, 371, 37^-6,
378; in contemporary world, 381

Jefferson, Thomas, and promulgation
of Monroe Doctrine, 209-10

Jellicoe, Admiral Sir John, and Battle
of Jutland, 327-8

Jenkins's Ear, War of, (1739), 134-5,
136

Jervis, Sir John: see St. Vincent

Jesuits, founding of, 32; during Res-
toration, 105-6, 107; and commu-
nists, 382, 392-3

Jugoslavia, created (1919), 334;
French alliance with, 340; overrun
by Germans (1941), 373

Julius II, Pope, and marriage of Henry
VIII, 17, 19-20

Junius, Letters of, quoted, 153-4,
15^-5

Jutland, Battle of, (1916), 327-8

Katharine of Aragon, wife of Henry
VIII, 16-7, 18-9, 31

Khartum, Gordon at, 283; Kitchener
at, 288

Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 168, 295,
303

Kirk of Scotland, and James I, 46, 51-
2; and Charles I, 73; and Cromwell,
88-9; and union with England, 123;
mentioned, 37. See also Presby-
terianism

Kitchener, Sir Herbert, (later Earl
Kitchener), and reconquest of Su-
dan, 288; in Boer War, 294; in
first World War, 321

Klosterzeven, capitulation of, (1757),
138; mentioned, 96

Kruger, Paul, and Boer War, 290-4;
tradition of, 343

Labour Party, genesis of, 296-8; and
Liberal triumph of 1906, 307, 348;
and Parliament Bill (1910), 310,
311; during first World War, 348;
between wars, 348-50, 353-4, 360;
triumph of, in election of 1945, 349,
385-6, 393

Laissez faire, foreshadowed in reign
of Charles I, 69; development with
Industrial Revolution, 174-5, 219-
20; and factory acts, 222; and
chartism, 224; and Tory democracy,
249; and Gladstonianism, 256, 258;
abandoned by Liberals after 1906,
307-8, 348

Land, ownership of: in England, rela-
tionship to taxation, 125, social and
political importance in eighteenth
century, 1289, and agrarian revo-
lution, 171, and first Reform Bill,
218-9, and corn law, 213, 226-8,
and Liberal legislation after 1906,
308, and social changes after first
World War, 353, and see Gentry;
in Ireland, and problem of absen-
teeism, 88, 214r-5, and Gladstone's
reform of land law, 262-4

Land Acts, Irish, ( 1870, 1881 ), 263-4

Land League, Irish, (1879), 263-4

La Rochelle, siege of, by Richelieu,
62-3

Laud, William, Archbishop of Canter-
bury, 66, 70-3; death, 76; men*
tioned, 113

League of Augsburg, War of the,
(1688), 117

League of Nations, and problem of
coercion, 208; early years of, 338-
41; dominions' membership in, 344;
compared with British Common-
wealth, 346; British faith in, 353-4,
357-8, 360; British policy toward,
354, 361-2

Levellers, opposed to Cromwell, 93
4; survival of theories of, 95; com-
pared with chartists, 224, 225

Lexington, Battle of (1775), 156

Liberal Party, adoption of name, 229-
30; heretics in, 244; mid-Victorian
monopoly of power by, 245, 247;
and second Reform Bill, 252-4; un-
der Gladstone, 256-9, 260-8, 276-
8, 280-6; and schism of 1886, 229,

XU

Index

Marriage policy, of Henry VH, 16; of
Henry VIII, 18-23; of Mary, 31-3;
of Elizabeth, 46; of James I, 59-60;
of Charles I, 61-2; of Stuarts after
Restoration, 105

Marxism: see Socialism, Marxian

Mary, Queen of England, daughter of
Henry VIII, birth and childhood,
18-9, 23; reign, 31-3; compared
with James IE, 109, 110; mentioned,
114

Mary II, Queen of England, daughter
of James II, as heiress presumptive,
105, 106, 110-1; accession, 111-2;
death, 122

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, reign
and dethronement in Scotland, 39-
40, 53, 72; claimant to English
throne, 41, 42, 46

Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VHI, 16,
23, 46

Massachusetts, settlement of, 58; in
American Revolution, 155-6

Mediterranean, British concern with,
tinder Cromwell, 90-2; in War of
Spanish Succession, 119, 120-2; in
Wars of French Revolution and Na-
poleon, 183, 184, 191-2; in Greek
revolt, 210-2; in Crimean War,
241-3; in late-Victorian era, 270,
278-80, 281; in first World War,
326; and Ethiopian crisis, 361-3;
in second World War, 370, 372,
375, 376-7

Mercantilism, and policy of Charles I,
69; and Cromwell's trade wars, 90-
2; and English hostility to Louis
XIV, 104, 111; and eighteenth-cen-
tury colonial rivalries, 133, 139,
142-3; and American Revolution,
148, 163; and Industrial Revolution,
174-5; rejected in Britain after
1846, 225-30, 233; revival of, in
late nineteenth century, 274-6

Methodism, origin and effects of, 178
80

Metternich, Prince Clemens von, and
concert of Europe, 205-6, 207-8,
211, 212, 239, 338; mentioned, 250,
269

Middle class, in Tudor period, 8-12,
14; and abolition of monasteries,
21-3; under Elizabeth, 37, 50; in
Stuart local government, 68-9; en-
franchised (1832), 221; loyalty of,
to Victoria, 225; Disraeli's views of,

Middle class (continued)

247-8; and second Reform Bill,
254

Midlothian campaign (1880), 280,
286; and first Boer War, 285

Milton, John, quoted, 84, 230; and
Paradise Lost, 115; mentioned, 113

Minorca, acquired by Britain (1708),
120-1, 122; captured by French
(1756), 138; ceded to Spain by
Britain (1783), 161; and Peace of
Amiens, 189

Missionary movement: see Evangeli-
calism

Monasteries, abolition of, by Henry
VIH, 21-2, 32

Monk, George, Cromwellian general
and admiral, in first Dutch War, 91;
and end of Protectorate, 95, 97

Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of, and
claim to throne, 104, 106; rebellion
and death, 110

Monroe Doctrine, formulated (1823),
209-10; and German expansion by
1914, 317; extended to Canada, 374

Montenegro, in Treaty of San Stefano,
278; in Treaty of Berlin, 279

Morocco, French designs on, 304-5;
international crises over, 305, 312,
315, 316, 317-8; in second World
War, 376

Munich, Peace of, (1938), compared
with Peace of Amiens, 190, and
with Peace of Tilsit, 199; origins
and conclusion of, 359, 363-5

Mussolini, and pre-war Italian aggres-
sion, 357, 361-3; in second World
War, 369

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French,
and Egyptian expedition, 184-5;
First Consul, 188, 190; Emperor,
191-7, 198-200, 203; compared
with Napoleon HI, 240, and with
Hitler, 184, 190, 358, 373; men-
tioned 326, 381

Napoleon HI, Emperor of the French,
accession, 23940; and Crimean
War, 241-3; mentioned, 381

Natal, settled by Boers, 236; annexed
by Britain, 237; and Zulu danger,
284; and first Boer War, 285; and
second Boer War, 289, 293

National Government, formed (1931),
350; quality of leadership in, 353,
354, 360, 364-6, 368

XIV

Index

North, Lord (Earl of Guilford), Prime
Minister, 154-6, 161, 164, 169;
mentioned, 238

North Sea, German bid for naval su-
premacy in, 303, 313, 316, 321,
327-8; and German invasion of
Scandinavia (1940), 368

Northumberland, John Dudley, Duke
of, Regent for Edward VI, 30-1

Nova Scotia, acquired by Britain from
France (1713), 121

Gates, Titus, and Popish Plot, 107-8;
mentioned, 213

O'Connell, Daniel, and Catholic eman-
cipation, 215; compared with Par-
nell, 264

Orange Free State, settled by Boers,
236; granted autonomy (1854),
237; relations with South African
Republic, 285, 292; annexed by
Britain, 294

Orthodox Church, origin of, 25; in
Turkey, and Crimean War, 241,
242

Ottawa Conference (1932), 350-1;
mentioned, 352

Ottoman Empire: see Turkey

Palatinate, in Thirty Years' War, 59,
62

Pale, Irish, 3, 5-6; under Elizabeth,
44; under James I, 57-8

Palestine, in Crimean War, 241; in
first World War, 331; and Zionism,
337; British withdrawal from, 384

Palmerston, Henry Temple, Viscount,
and Pax Britannica, 239, 271, 276;
and Crimean War, 241; influence
on Disraeli, 246, 257, 286; last min-
istry, 251; effect of death, 252

Panama Canal, American interest in,
compared with British interest in
Suez, 281; British abandonment of
rights in, (1901), 303

Papacy, relations of, with Henry VEH,
19-24; claims of, 24-7; relations
of, with Mary, 31-3; in Elizabethan
Ireland, 44; English antipathy to,
33, 35, 45, 60, 65, 71-2, 103, 104-
5, 107-9, 110. See also Recusants

Paris: Peace of, (1763), 141-4, 149,
160, 162; Peace of, (1856), 242-3,
amended by Russia, 270, 276, 278;
Conference and Peace of, (1919),
and resultant settlement, 3327,

Paris: Peace of (continued)

339, 356, and see Versailles, Treaty
of

Parliament, British, in early Tudor
period, 9-11; and Henry VIE, 20-
1, 22, 27, 28; and Mary, 32; and
Elizabeth, 34-5, 46; and James
I, 54-6, 59-60; and Charles I, 61-7,
74, 75-9, 84, 86; of Commonwealth
and Protectorate, 91, 94; and
Charles II, 95-6, 99-101, 102-3,
106, 108; and James II, 110; and
settlement of Glorious Revolution,
113, 115-6; and union with Scot-
land, 123-4; under Hanoverians,
129-32, 138, 174; and American
Revolution, 148, 150, 152, 153, 154-
5; and India, 165-7; movement to
reform, 169-71, 175, 176-8, 216-9,
221-2, 245, 253-4; and repeal of
corn law, 228-9; Disraeli's views of,
246-9, 250; ParnelTs attempt to dis-
credit, 265-6; and Liberal reforms
after 1906, 307, 308, 309, 310; and
National Government of 1930's,
354. See also House of Commons;
House of Lords; Union, Acts of

Parliament, Cavalier, (1661), early
years of, 100-1, 113; dissolution
(1679), 108

Parliament, Irish, 163-4, 186-7, 188

Parliament, Long, (1642), and de-
struction of monarchy, 75-9, 84, 86;
restored and dissolved, 95; acts of,
at Restoration, 99

Parliament, Rump, created (1648),
86; and Navigation Act, 91; dis-
solved by Cromwell (1653), 94;
reconvened, 95

Parliament, Short, (1640), 74, 75

Parnell, Charles, and Home Rule, 264-
6; death, 286

Paul, Emperor of Russia, 189

Peel, Sir Robert, and Catholic emanci-
pation, 215, 216; and repeal of
corn law, 228-9; followers of,
(Peelites), 229, 245, 252, 256, 268;
and franchise, 247; compared with
Gladstone, 266

Peerage, Tudor, 8-9, 10; as source of
Hanoverian patronage, 130; condi-
tion of, by 1906, 308; threat to, in
1910, 310

Peninsular War (1808), 196-7

Persia (Iran), Anglo-Russian friction
over, 243; and Triple Entente, 313;

XVI

Index

Railroads (continued)

India, 244; and decay of Irish agri-
culture, 263; and Boer War, 291-2,
294

Raleigh, Sir Walter, and theories of
colonization, 47

Rationalism, and religious toleration,
114-5; revolutionary implications
of, in late eighteenth century, 145-
9, 156; and George UYs experi-
ment, 151; and French Revolution,
176-8; and classical liberalism, 217,
219-20, 227, 230-1, 234; and
Gladstonianism, 256, 257, 272; and
Neville Chamberlain, 360

Recusants, under Elizabeth, 35, 40,
42, 45; under Charles I, 61-2; un-
der Charles II, 99, 101, 102, 104r-
5, 106; under James n, 110; after
Glorious Revolution, 114, 115-6,
126; enfranchised in Ireland
(1793), 185, and see Catholic
emancipation.

Reform Bill: first (1832), 217, 221-
2, 229, 252, results of, 222r-4, Dis-
raeli's views of, 247-8; second
(1867), 253-4, 255, 261, and trade
unionism, 259, mentioned, 261, 278;
third (1884-5), 269-1, 265

Reformation, Catholic: see Papacy;
Spain; Trent, Council of

Reformation, Protestant, 20, 146, and
see Protestantism

Renaissance, spread of, in sixteenth
century, 4; and eighteenth-century
enlightenment, 146

Revenues, governmental, early nature
of, 10; under Henry VTI, 15-6; un-
der Henry VTH, 18; under James I,
54^5, 56-7; under Charles I, 62,
70, 77; at Restoration, 99; problem
of, created by Peace of Paris
(1763), 143, 144, 147-50, 151,
154-5; problem of, created by Lib-
eral triumph of 1906, 308-9

Revolution, American, causes, 142-4,
147-51, 154-6; in British politics,
153, 155, 157, 161, 169; War of
the, 156-61, 188-9, 194; and Ire-
land, 163; mentioned, 177, 374,
380

Revolution, Diplomatic, of 1756, 137;
of 1902-7, 300-6, 312-20

Revolution, French: first (1789), out-
break, 176-7, opposition of British
conservatism to, 177-8, 180-1,

Revolution, French (continued)

Wars of the, and Napoleon, 168,
169, 170, 175, 178, 181-6, 18&-200,
232, 323, aftereffects of, 200-1,
204-5, 210, 273, and educational
reform, 258; second (1830), 217;
third (1848), 239-40

Revolution, Glorious, (1688), course
and characteristics, 110-1; settle-
ment following, 1126; and Hano-
verian accession, 126-7; mentioned,
139, 222, 229

Revolution, Industrial, and relation to
rationalism, 147; advent and prob-
lems of, 170-6; affected by Wars
of French Revolution and Napoleon,
176, 195, 201; and Tory Reaction,
2123; and economic liberalism,
219, 220, 222-3, 226-8, 230; and
growth of Victorian empire, 232,
237-8; and second Reform Bill,
254; worldwide spread of, in late
nineteenth century, 274-5, 296, 305;
and British depression of 1930's,
347, 349-50, 352-3; and Britain's
contemporary position, 384

Revolution, Puritan, Charles I's per-
sonal rule as preliminary phase of,
68-75; reforms of Long Parlia-
ment in, 75-9; first Civil War in,
813; triumph of Independents in,
83-7; Commonwealth and Protec-
torate as climax of, 87-95; after-
effects of, 95-7, 99-100, 132; com-
pared with Glorious Revolution,
112, with American Revolution, 156,
and with chartism, 225

Rhineland, in armistice and peace
settlement (1918-9), 332, 335, 336,
338, 340; and Locarno treaties,
3401; reoccupied and fortified by
Hitler, 362; in second World War,
377-8

Rhodes, Cecil, and origins of Boer
War, 291-2

Rhodesia, creation of, 291

Richard m, King of England, despot-
ism of, 7, 12

Richelieu, Cardinal, and French for-
eign policy, 61-2, 98; mentioned,
381

Romanticism, and Jacobitism, 123;
and eighteenth-century imperial-
ism, 139, 167-8; and Greek revolt,
211; and popular loyalty to Vic-
toria, 225; of Disraeli, 245-6

XVU1

Index

Scotland (continued)

with France, 6, 39; in late six-
teenth century, 51-2; and planta-
tion of Ulster, 57-8; rebellion
against Charles I, 72-5; in second
Civil War, 85-6, 88-9; Cromwellian
settlement of, 89, 92; union with
England (1707), 123-4, 164; and
Jacobite risings, 127, 136

Sea dogs, Elizabethan, 41-3, 48

Sea power: see Navy; Royal Navy

Selden, John, quoted, 80

Sepoy Mutiny (1857), 243-4

Serbia, revolt of, against Turks, 210;
in Treaty of San Stefano, 278; in
Treaty of Berlin, 279; and origins
of first World War, 314, 315, 318-
9; in first World War, 324, 365;
and settlement of 1919: see Jugo-
slavia

Settlement, Act of, (1701), 123

Sevastopol, siege of, in Crimean War,
242

Seven Years' War (1756), 137-43;
mentioned, 157, 167, 188, 302

Seymour, Jane, wife of Henry VIII, 23

Shakespeare, William, quoted, 10, 25,
28, 49, 86, 194

Ship money (1634), 70, 90; men-
tioned, 154

Short Parliament: see Parliament,
Short

Silesia, Austro-Prussian rivalry over,
134, 135, 136, 137

Singapore, and fall of France (1940),
371; captured by Japanese, 374,
378

Sinn Fein, and rebellion of 1916, 345.
See also Ireland, creation of Free
State

Six Articles, of Henry Vm, 27, 28

Slavery, and slave trade with Spanish
America, 121; abolition of, through-
out British Empire, 180, 222, 236;
and British opinion of American
Civil War, 251

Smith, Adam, on imperial reform, 149,
163

Socialism: British, and classical lib-
eralism, 218, and Tory democracy^
249, and Fabians, 297, and party
realignments before 1906, 298-300,
and Liberal policies after 1906,
307-9, 310-1, and Labour program
of 1920's, 348-9, and contemporary
Labor program, 386, 393; Marxian,

Socialism: British (continued)

and cult of force, 271-2, and British
trade unionism, 296-7

Somerset, Edward Seymour, Duke of,
Regent for Edward VI, 29-31, 35

Sophia, Electress of Hanover, 123,
126

South Africa Company, and origins of
Boer War, 291-2

South African Republic, creation of,
(1881), 285; in Boer War, 289-94.
See also Transvaal

Spain, sixteenth-century dynastic alli-
ance of, with Austria, 13-4, with
early Tudors, 16-7, 18-23, with
Mary, 31-3; and partition of
Charles V*s empire, 31-2; role of,
in Catholic Reformation, 32, 382;
relations with Elizabethan England,
38-9, 40-4, 45, and with James I,
58-60; war with Charles I, 61-2,
and with Cromwell, 912; in era of
Louis XIV, 98, 117-22; relations
with Hanoverian Britain, 134-6,
141; in American Revolution, 157,
159, 161-2, 164; in Wars of French
Revolution and Napoleon, 176, 182-
3, 191-2, 193, 196-7; and crisis of
1823, 206, 208-10, 212; war with
United States (1898), 275, 302;
rights of, in Morocco (1904), 304;
Civil War (1936), 363; in second
World War, 372

Spanish Succession, War of the,
(1702), 117-22; and Act of Union
with Scotland, 123-4

Squirearchy: see Gentry

Stalin, Joseph, and outbreak of sec-
ond World War, 365-6; compared
with Philip H, 382

Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of,
and attempt to preserve Charles Ts
personal rule, 74r-5; attainted, 76-
7, 108; mentioned, 78

Stuart, House of, and claim to Eng-
lish throne, 16, 18, 23; and Palati-
nate, 59-60; post-Restoration dy-
nastic problem of, 104-5; and
Anglo-Scottish union, 124; sover-
eigns of: see Anne; Charles I;
Charles II; James I; James H; Mary
II; William IH

Submarines, in first World War, 326-
7, 328-9, 330-1; in Spanish Civil
War, 363; in second World War,
367, 370, 373, 378, 384

XX

Index

Triple Alliance, 301, 304; deserted by
Italy in first World War, 326

Triple Entente, genesis of, 312-4;
and first World War, 314r-6, 317-
20; possibility of reviving in late
1930's, 357

Tudor, House of, problems confront-
ing, 5-12; governmental system of,
14-5, 20, 50, 66-8; sovereigns of:
see Edward VI; Elizabeth; Henry
VII; Henry VIII; Mary

Turkey (Ottoman Empire), in Napo-
leonic era, 196; and Greek revolt,
210-2; and Crimean War, 241-3,
244; and crisis of 1878, 278-80;
and British occupation of Egypt,
281-4; and origins of first World
War, 313-5; in first World War,
324, 331; and peace settlement,
336-7; in second World War, 372;
contemporary Anglo-Russian fric-
tion over, 382

Uitlanders, role of, in precipitating
Boer War, 289-93

Ulster, Jacobean plantation of, 578;
restrictions on Protestants of, 164,
185-6; and Catholic emancipation,
187, 215; and first Home Rule Bill,
266; and third Home Rule Bill,
311-2; and creation of Irish Free
State, 345, 346

Union, Act of: with Scotland (1707),
124; with Ireland (1800), 186-8,
214-6, 267, and movement to re-
peal: see Home Rule; Ulster; Un-
ionists

Union of South Africa, created
(1910), 343; in first World War,
344; in second World War, 379,
384; in contemporary world, 385,
388

Unionists, genesis of, 267-8; fusion
with Conservatives, 286-7, 295;
split by Joseph Chamberlain, 299-
300

United Nations, and problem of co-
ercion, 208; origins of, 378; and
Anglo-American struggle with Rus-
sia, 382

United States, role of judiciary in,
56, 70, 308; achievement of in-
dependence, 159-61; nineteenth-
century position, 162-3, 329, 380;
and War of 1812, 195-6, 197-8;
and Monroe Doctrine, 209-10, 317;

United States (continued)

Civil War, 243, 251, 261-2, 269,
271, 321; Spanish-American War,
135, 275, 302; economic competi-
tion with Britain, 274, 296, 347,
351; and Alabama claims, 276-7;
and Panama Canal, 281, 303; Salis-
bury's policy toward, 295; naval
competition with Britain, 303, 329,
341-2; during first World War,
325, 326-7, 328-31, 345; with-
drawal from peace settlement, 330,
332, 336, 338-9, 340, 379; and
reparations, 341; in 1930's, 308,
350; and origins of second World
War, 361; in second World War,
355, 370-1, 373-80, 381; in con-
temporary world, 380, 381-3, 386;
present relationship with British
Commonwealth, 384-5, 387-93

Utrecht, Treaty of, (1713), 121-2,
125-6; instability of peace settle-
ment, 133-5; mentioned, 140

Valois, House of, in sixteenth-century
France, 12-3, 38-40

Venezuela, Anglo-American friction
over, 277

Vereeniging, Treaty of, (1902), 294-
5; mentioned, 300

Verona, Congress of, (1822), 206

Versailles, Treaty of: (1783), 161-
2, mentioned, 168; (1919), 333,
341, Nazi abrogation of, 338, 358-
9, 361-2, 365

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, char-
acter and initial problems, 225; and
alienation of Hanover from British
Crown, 240; relations with Dis-
raeli, 260; and relief of Gordon,
283; death, 256, 295

Vienna, Congress and Treaty of,
(1815), 202-6, 276, 332

Villeneuve, Pierre Charles de, French
admiral in Trafalgar campaign, 192,
199

Villiers, George: see Buckingham

Virginia, in early Stuart period, 58,
69; and Cromwellian Common-
wealth, 90; in American Revolution,
160-1

Voltaire, Frangois Marie Arouet,
quoted, 167; mentioned, 147

Wales, English conquest of, 7; in In-
dustrial Revolution, 173

XXU

Seeds of Greatness, 14851603

were saved by what were later famous as their walls of oak, and
victory perpetuated their concentration on naval force.

The timing of their victory was of cardinal importance. It came
just when forces of change were turning their energies seaward. The
drama of the great fight, with its overtones of divine intervention,
fired the national consciousness and stimulated an outburst of en-
ergy. Through the smoke of gunfire in the Channel a vague glimpse
of her future came to

"England, hedg'd in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.'* 7

The Elizabethans were confident, ebulliently so, because they had
proved their security from foreign purposes security for their
land, their church, their monarch. But the blend of confidence and
security led their descendants to question the nature of what had
been secured. The questioning revealed paradoxes, ecclesiastical
and constitutional, and in the atmosphere of peace dissension throve.
Within forty years of Elizabeth's death the land had become a bat-
tlefield, and the Elizabethan structure of church and monarchy lay
in ruins. The winning of security from without, in short, contributed
to its destruction from within.

7 Shakespeare: King John, H, i, 26-8.

49

Star of Empire

James's theory was not a mere outgrowth of Scottish quarrels. Its
roots were in the Middle Ages, and its full flowering was still to
come on the Continent. There the old authoritarian principle of the
papacy was growing weaker in practice, and the new pretensions of
Protestant sects were producing civil chaos; men were turning more
and more to the solace of secular authority, and their emphasis on
kingship was rising. James's notions were not peculiar to him, but
were signs of a new age in Europe.

That age was not for Britain. The Scots were unready for it: they
did not want secular authority at the price of their turbulent free-
dom. The English were beyond it: the monarchy that had saved
them from social and religious chaos had outlasted the reasons for
its emergency powers. James and his son attempted to elevate those
powers to the status of a divine commandment. The attempt was re-
sisted as an innovation by the Scots, as an anachronism by the
English.

England was the testing ground for James. He knew his Scots too
well to press them, and his pretensions at home were limited by an
almost Tudor consciousness of what the market would bear. In Eng-
land he was on strange ground. He never learned his new subjects'
way of speech or thought, and he mistook his position as their king.
His problems called for a maximum of adaptability, tact, and for-
bearance; what he saw was a heaven-sent opportunity for putting
his theories into effect. The misjudgment is not surprising, for the
English constitution seemed to be ideal material for a reforming
monarch. The independence of the Crown was limited, it is true, by
parliamentary control of finances and by a common law entrenched
in largely autonomous courts; but the Tudors had shown that these
restrictions could be to a great degree circumvented, and a wise
king might improve on their example. The government was woe-
fully untidy. It challenged James, with his logician's sense of neat-
ness, to reform it into an ordered system.

If the challenge of civil government was alluring, that offered by
the Church was dazzling. To a king who had struggled for years in
the Scottish wilderness, the episcopal establishment seemed like the
promised land. Here the power of the Crown had akeady been ex-
alted. The king ruled through the bishops and the ecclesiastical
courts; Parliament, representing the laity, had at most the right to
approve a fundamental change in doctrine. James had no wish to

The Passing of Tudor England^ 1603-1660

not disagree. He was no fool, not even a wise one, and in many ways
he was more intelligent than most of his subjects. But his intelligence
was not political. It was inelastic, without room for even the humil-
ity of doubt. He could never foresee, like Louis XV, that a deluge
was impending, and this intellectual arrogance made him as bad a
judge of measures as of men. He welcomed the forthright course,
and if necessary the open breach, as much as Elizabeth had dreaded
them; he trusted flatterers where she had only delighted in flattery.
He passed on to his son, in consequence, a legacy of grievances and
a pernicious favorite.

Ill The Breach with Parliament

GEORGE VILLIERS, Duke of Buckingham, was a charming young
man from Leicestershire, the most successful of the upstarts who
had replaced Elizabeth's counselors. She would have found a place
for him; he was decorative and amusing, and his manners made up
for what he lacked in lineage and morals. But she would never have
given him power. James did, and Charles gave him as he gave no
one else the friendship of a brother. The Duke accompanied the
Prince to Madrid, and the two returned to become virtually joint
rulers. Their combined statesmanship did not equal that of James
alone. For four years they guided Britain deeper and deeper into
the morass of foreign adventures, while at home they followed a pol-
icy that completed their fiascoes abroad. By the time the Duke died,
in 1628, the breach between monarchy and people had grown be-
yond bridging.

The pair assumed power on a wave of popularity. They were the
champions of nationalism against Spain, and for the first time in
years the executive could reasonably expect support from Parlia-
ment. But support was lost by one of the first acts of the new re-
gime. Because a Spanish war put a premium upon the friendship of
France, a marriage was concluded between Charles and Henrietta
Maria, the sister of Louis XIII. The rebound from the Spanish match
precipitated a French one, which was equally impolitic.

The Bourbon alliance was built on misunderstandings. Louis' new
minister, Cardinal Richelieu, expected the British government to
adopt a more tolerant attitude toward recusants, and to stand by
while he settled accounts with the rebellious French Huguenots;

61

Star of Empire

Chief among them was William Laud, with whom the Catholic
movement has become synonymous. Laud was in high favor with
Buckingham and Charles, and the new King's accession brought
him rapid advancement; in 1628 he was made Bishop of London,
whence his eyes turned toward the pinnacle of Canterbury. His
progress was proof that the new King embraced his ideas.

Charles could scarcely help himself. His incomprehension and
dislike of Puritanism, his devotion to the beauty of ritual, predis-
posed him to favor the Laudians; their deference to him on details
of Church government flattered his sense of guiding his people. He
was oblivious of danger because he did not know his subjects. He
had no way of knowing them except by observing the barometer of
the House of Commons, and he was even less able than his father to
read that delicate instrument. In consequence he adopted a course
that shattered the Elizabethan Church and did more than any other
single factor to bring down the monarchy.

The immediate effect was a breach with Parliament. The financial
quarrel was insoluble because it involved the vital issue of the
Church. Tension mounted rapidly, and in the spring of 1629 the cli-
max came in three resolutions of the House of Commons. They de-
clared that anyone who advocated new doctrines in the Church, or
had any part in the collection or payment of customs duties without
the consent of Parliament, was a capital enemy of the kingdom. Obe-
dience to the King, in other words, was treason to the kingdom. This
was verbal rebellion, and Charles replied by dissolving Parliament.

The dissolution marked the end of the Tudor system. The delicate
"balance of forces that had made possible a government by Crown,
lords, and commons had given place to a conflict of the two strong-
est forces in the state, the King and the Lower House. In the days of
Peter Wentworth this conflict had been foreshadowed in religion,
and in James's reign it had spread rapidly to issues of law, econom-
ics, and diplomacy. The crisis came when Charles began to remodel
the Church at a moment when his fiscal and foreign policy had al-
ready stirred the commons to fury. The result was the end of parlia-
mentary government as Englishmen had known it.

Such government was possible only on a basis of co-operation, for
neither side could force its will on the other. The King could not
coerce the House of Commons; he could only dissolve it. The com-
mons could hamstring his policy by refusing supplies, but they could

66

The Passing of Tudor England, 1603-1660

freedom of members from arrest; here was trie long-dreaded coup
d'etat. It failed ignominiously because the men had escaped, but it
showed that the King had no more scruples than his enemies about
the use of violence. A committee of the commons took refuge in the
city, which called out its trained bands for their defense; a week
later Charles fled to the country. The weapons of legal process had
broken, and only the sword remained.

During the following months a majority of the peers and a mi-
nority of the commons withdrew from Parliament to join the King.
Most of those who went and those who stayed were moderates, for
whom the coming war was a calamity. They all had a common aim
to rebuild the old constitution and define a sphere for both the
Crown and Parliament. The quarrel at this stage was about the defi-
nition, not the principle, of limited monarchy, but the principle it-
self was jeopardized once fighting started. If the King won, mon-
archy would scarcely be limited; if the commons won, it would be
reduced to impotence. This dilemma bred the half-heartedness re-
flected in the early campaigns. The combatants lacked the will to
total victory.

Half-heartedness does not imply that the differences at issue were
minor. They derived, on the contrary, from a divergence so funda-
mental that it endured through many transmutations into the nine-
teenth century. The essence of the first Civil War was not a dispute
over methods or men, but a conflict of two instinctive attitudes to-
ward government. From those attitudes grew the later political par-
ties, Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, which fought each
other down the years. The questions at issue in any period were
symptoms; below them was the dash of instincts that had drawn
blood in the days of King Charles.

Party labels had not been invented in the 1640*s, and the period
is confused with names. Among them Puritan predominates, but the
Puritans were not the only revolutionaries. The supporters of parlia-
ment, known genetically as Roundheads, ranged from episcopalians
to Christian communists, although a majority was tinged with some
form of Puritanism. Among the royalists the most numerous group
was the Anglican Cavaliers; by their side fought Roman and Laud-
ian Catholics, and Puritans who loved the Crown more than they
hated bishops. Then where is the conflict of instinctive attitudes? In
the two most numerous groups, where it can be shown only by

79

Star of Empire

hypothecating, for contrast, two men who did not exist the typical
Puritan and the typical Cavalier.

The Puritan was a rebel against traditional authority. In religion
he substituted for apostolic tradition the voice of his own con-
science; "he would have me believe him/' as John Selden put it,
"before a whole church that has read the word of God as well as
he.'* That word, for him, was not primarily love but righteousness;
his God was the God of Sinai more than of Calvary, and he went to
war with the psalms for battle-hymns. *I will smite down his foes
before his face, and plague them that hate him." His grim earnest-
ness cut him off from ordinary men, and they often disliked him
cordially above all when he had an official position. The complaint
of some villagers about their policeman had its echoes all over Eng-
land: he was accused of "arrogating to himself a singularity of
sanctity." 5

The same earnest individualism colored the Puritan's politics. In
principle he was willing to be ruled by the elect, but in practice he
was quick to doubt the predestined salvation of any rulers. The
doubt was less a matter of belief than of instinct; he distrusted gov-
ernment as such. For this reason his cause found adherents for a
time among those who cared little for his religious views. The ten-
ant 'whose cattle had gone for his landlord's ship money, the dis-
gruntled clothier, the sheriff bullied by the privy council, the coun-
tryman who had lost his tobacco such men, for secular reasons,
shared the Puritan's resentment of royal interference and identified
the cause of Parliament with their desire to be let alone. Puritanism
and localism both drew their power, in different ways, from the
seUF-importance of the individual, and at the outset both contributed
to the great rebellion.

The self-importance of the Cavalier was as robust as that of his
opponents. Its source, however, was the corporate strength of the
community a community that was not a thing of the moment but
went back into the immemorial past. The institutions that embodied
it for him were those with the prescriptive sanction of time. Among
them two were paramount, the Church and the Crown. His abiding
loyalty to both was untouched by his dislike of Laud and his annoy-
ance with Charles. Prelates and kings came and went; prelacy and

5 From manuscript testimony, ca. 1613, in the Public Record Office (Lon-
don) : St Ch. 8/239/3.

80

Star of 'Empire

different from that of two years before; their enemies, in fighting a
second time, had defied the judgment of the Almighty. "It is the
repetition of the same offense," declared Cromwell, "against all the
witnesses that God hath borne." The vanquished must suffer for
their contumely, and chief among them the "man of blood/* Charles
Stuart. But only Parliament could claim the authority to judge him,
and instead it reopened negotiations with him. In December 1648,
therefore, the Independents took a fateful step: soldiers unseated
the Presbyterian members of the Commons. This was more than
punishment of a faction, more even than preparation for attacking
the King. It marked the emergence of the sword as the final political
argument.

Worse was to come. The purge left a small group in the Lower
House, known to history as the Rump either because it was the
last fragment of the remainder of the Long Parliament, or because
it was the part which still sat. Its members were for the moment the
tool of their creator, the army, and they moved rapidly to imple-
ment its will. They abolished the House of Lords and brought the
King to trial for his life. The disappearance of the peers left only a
ripple in the surge of revolution, but the Crown was another matter.
Shakespeare, in this, had spoken for an England that still endured.

Not all the waters of the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord. 11

Charles had done little to win the love of his subjects. He had mis-
used his power, squandered his prestige, abandoned his friends and
even his Church. The bulk of the people might have accepted a
drastic curtailment of his authority; but to them he was still the
Lord's deputy, and killing him was sin. This feeling was so wide-
spread that it extended even to many members of the court that
the Rump created to try him, and the death sentence was pushed
through with difficulty. Charles himself was superb. The darker his
fortunes became, the more they revealed his courage and dignity.
He refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court, and ap-
pealed from it to the judgment of the world. His greatest moment
came in his speech from the scaffold: "For the people, truly I desire

Richard II, III, ii,

86

was

Star of Empire

. court-martialed for deviating from the sacrosanct formation.
Such conservatism helps to explain why the navy achieved no con-
clusive victories at sea.

The land war was equally inconclusive. In America the great
French fortress of Louisburg was captured and Canada opened to
invasion, but the British government neglected its opportunity for
the sake of the European struggle. In 1745 the pretender's son,
Charles Edward, landed in Scotland and rallied the Highlanders to
the Stuart cause. His invasion of England collapsed for lack of sup-
port, and he soon fled into exile again. Meanwhile, however, he had
frightened the government into withdrawing the bulk of its troops
from the Continent, and the French improved the shining hour by
appropriating the Austrian Netherlands. The upshot was that France
and Prussia had important gains in Europe, and Britain in Canada,
and that neither side could oust the other. In the circumstances fur-
ther hostilities seemed pointless.

Negotiations led to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Freder-
ick retained Silesia; otherwise virtually everything was restored to
its pre-war status. Louisburg was returned to France, the Nether-
lands to Austria, and the issues behind the War of Jenkins's Ear
were passed over in silence. Britain had fought for nine years; she
had gained nothing and lost nothing. The settlement seems fantastic
by modem standards, but it was intelligible enough at a time when
war was a form of business enterprise. If the business ceased to show
a profit, actual or potential, reason suggested liquidating it on the
best possible terms.

The terms of 1748 satisfied no one except Prussia, and they also
ruined no one. For both reasons the treaty was scarcely signed be-
fore the signatories were dreaming of new coalitions. The prime
mover was Austria. The Hapsburgs did not take kindly to change,
particularly at their expense, and the rise of Prussia was disturbing;
Frederick had in fact begun the Austro-Prussian struggle for the
dominance of Germany that lasted from the invasion of Silesia in
1740 to the Battle of Sadowa in 1866. The government of Maria
Theresa was acute enough to sense the challenge and spirited
enough to accept it Vienna had lost the first round, but the second
was still to be fought. Prussia had become a great power in one "war,
and she might be reduced to insignificance in another.

It required a great coalition to crush her. One member was ready

The Triumph of the Oligarchy, 1660-1763

colleague and were bad auguries for the future, but they had not yet
sapped his greatness. He was a poet in action, and the epic on which
he was engaged was the British empire.

His imperialism was not that of the mercantilists. Territory inter-
ested him more than profits; he dreamed o an expanding power of
which trade was only one ingredient, and the Union Jack flying in
the wilderness fired his imagination more than the same flag over a
sugar plantation. This was a new romanticism. It quickened the
blood and gave to the cause of empire a deeper content than the
countinghouse had ever given it. Pitt was stirring the emotions of
Britain to the service of that cause, and they have remained in its
service ever since.

Romanticism, far from weakening Pitt's direction of the war, gave
him the vision needed for sound strategy. Has absorption with the
empire freed him almost automatically from the basic error of the
previous war the division of Britain's energies between Europe
and the sea, precluding victory in either sphere. In the Seven Years*
War Pitt used military force where it would be most effective, on
the sea and in small-scale land operations in distant parts of the
globe; scarcely a redcoat appeared on the Continent of Europe ex-
cept for diversionary raids. Prussia, however, was not neglected.
Whether or not Pitt ever said that he would win America in Ger-
many, to a large extent he did so not with British troops but with
British gold. Frederick was heavily subsidized to enable him to buy
mercenaries and other military supplies; without the money he
could hardly have held his own against a ring of enemies, and even
with it he came near disaster. But in the long run he turned out to
be Pitt's most profitable investment.

The combination of gold and sea power was the maturing of Brit-
ain's grand strategy. From the Glorious Revolution to the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle she had tried to fight France equally in Europe and
at sea; from the accession of Pitt to the Battle of Waterloo her ma-
jor military effort was at sea and overseas, and the bulk of Conti-
nental fighting was done by her allies. Hence the age-old gibe that
she fights to the last Prussian, or Frenchman, or American, or who-
ever the ally of the moment may be. The gibe had some truth in it
while she was waging her land wars as much as possible through
the armies of other nations.

This method, which Pitt first demonstrated, derived from the stra-

139

Georgian Britain, 1906-1932

only one, Hejaz, was allowed even nominal freedom. France ac-
quired the mandate of Syria, Britain the mandates of Mesopotamia
(Iraq), Trans jordania, and Palestine; Greece, the British protege,
annexed Turkish territories in Europe and Asia Minor. From the
Aegean to the Persian Gulf, Britain's influence was predominant

It was soon impaired by the rise of Turkish and Arab nationalism.
The Turks went to war with the Greeks, expelled them from Asia
Minor, and regained control of the straits; Britain was in no mood
to fight, and was forced to acquiesce. In Egypt and Iraq she was
faced -with independence movements that gradually weakened her
control. In Palestine she had complicated her problem by the Bal-
four Declaration of 1917, which had promised a Jewish "national
home** in the Holy Land while simultaneously guaranteeing the
rights of the Arab population. The promise was a contradiction in
terms, and it sowed the seeds of trouble with both Jews and Arabs
for the next thirty years.

Britain had thrown her imperial mantle over a number of hornets'
nests. The stings were painful, but they would be dangerous only
if one or both of her former rivals, Germany and Russia, began to
meddle again in the affairs of the Near and Middle East. In tibe
1920's that possibility seemed remote, and her position proportion-
ately secure.

In Europe also the settlement seemed to have brought her se-
curity. Dangers of war -were less imminent than they had been in
1815, if only because none of the major belligerents retained the
will and the means to fight. Italy was discontented with her lot but
too weak to do more than ruffle the surface of the peace; Germany
was exhausted and disarmed, Russia in anarchy. France emerged
for the last time as the chief force on the Continent She and her
satellites among the new states were intent on maintaining a status
quo of which they were the beneficiaries, and for the time being
they were more than a match for any aggressor. A balance of power
had returned, and the British felt that they could once more afford
to withdraw from active intervention in Europe. This feeling colored
their whole attitude toward the new international order that grew
out of the Paris Conference.

337

Star of Empire

live virtue, all too easily enlisted in the defense of the status quo.
The democracies cannot afford to be static in face of the communist
dynamic, or to experiment with progress in isolated laboratories of
their own. They are again engaged in defending their basic values,
as they did against fascism, and they can be effective only by pool-
ing their experience as well as their power. Danish co-operatives,
British socialized medicine, the Tennessee Valley Authority these
and other new departures, great and small, successful and unsuc-
cessful, are parts of the process by which democracy widens its
frontiers and generates its own dynamic. Democracies in coalition
can draw upon this force wherever it exists among them, and they
will have to handle it, unlike military power, with daring rather
than with moderation. Perception and self-control are not enough.
The crusading spirit is needed, or the Kremlin may inherit what is
left of the earth.

The difficulties, even in evading war in the immediate future,
seem from the present almost insuperable. Perhaps they are. To
assume that the two worlds of communism and democracy will
learn to adjust their conflict is rash optimism. But to assume that
they will resolve it only by war is to assume that a satanic de-
terminism is turning the nations of the atomic era into Gadarene
swine.

The ground for optimism is thin but real. Fear is a powerful cen-
tripetal force in the states of the West, and promises to increase as
Russia arms herself with atomic weapons; it has already helped to
pull the United States into collaboration with western Europe and
the Commonwealth and to prepare the way for truly united nations.
They may eventually be united less by fear than by the common
task of dissipating fear through agreement with Russia, as the only
long-term alternative to holocaust, and agreement in the end is not
inconceivable. To suppose that any nation can be unalterably the
enemy of another," in the words of the younger Pitt, "... is a libel
on the constitution of political societies, and supposes the existence
of diabolical malice in the original frame of man.~

The Russian people are not the enemy, and communism evolves
like all faiths. Within a generation the Stalinists may be as anti-
quated as Loyola's Jesuits today, and the incompatibles that sunder
East and West may have gone the way of those that sundered Loyo-

39*

Index

Franco-Prussian War (continued)
military lessons of, 273; and Bel-
gian neutrality, 276

Frederick, Elector Palatine, son-in-law
of James I, 59, 123

Frederick H, King of Prussia, 135-8,
139-42; mentioned, 202

Free trade, between England and
Scotland under Cromwell, 89; gen-
esis of nineteenth-century liberal
demand for, 174-5; relation to other
liberal doctrines, 220, 226; triumph
after 1846, 229-30; as Victorian re-
ligious tenet, 227, 230-1; and anti-
imperialism, 233-4, 246; challenged
in late-Victorian era, 274-5, 298-
300, 306, 309; abandoned after first
World War, 348-9, 350

Gallipoli: see Dardanelles

Gentry, in early Tudor period, 8-12;
in first Civil War, 81; and Restora-
tion Church, 100-1, 103; loyalty to
Charles II, 108; triumph in Glorious
Revolution, 113; dislike of War of
Spanish Succession, 125; holy ord-
ers a profession for, 128, 130; in
reign of George m, 151, 174; and
Tory Reaction, 213; Disraeli's views
of, 248-9; and second Reform Bill,
254; and social change after first
World War, 353

George I, King of Great Britain, ac-
cession and character, 126-7; posi-
tion in government, 130, 131; con-
trasted with George HI, 152

George n, King of Great Britain, posi-
tion in government, 130, 131; and
elder Pitt, 138, 141; contrasted
with George III, 152

George III, King of Great Britain, ac-
cession and fall of Pitt, 141; domes-
tic policy, 144, 151-4; and Ameri-
can Revolution, 155, 157-8, 159,
160, 161; and Ireland, 163, 187-8;
after fall of North administration,
168-9, 213, 225; mentioned, 97,
132, 238

George IV, King of Great Britain, as
Prince of Wales, 187-8; divorce
proceedings, 213-4; death, 216,
225

George V, King of Great Britain, ac-
cession, 310; appealed to by King
Albert (1914), 319-20; and for-

George V (continued)
mation of National Government
350; death, 354.

George VI, King of Great Britain, ac-
cession, 356

Germany, in Vienna settlement, 202,
204; rise of liberalism in, 205, 206,
239; unification of, 239, 240, 243,
269, 271; Empire (1871) and Bal-
kan question, 270, and see Drang
nach Osfen; as challenge to Vic-
torian liberalism, 271-4, 276, 295;
and Congress of Berlin, 27&-SO; in
South Africa, 289, 292, 293; and
Salisbury, 286; economic competi-
tion with Britain, 270-1, 296; role
in formation of Triple Entente,
300-3, 304-5, 313-4; and origins
of first World War, 314-20; in first
World War, 32O-2, 324-31, 345;
and peace settlement, 332, 333, 336,
337, 340-1, 356, 382; and origins
of second World War, 358^9, 380,
361, 36^-6; in second World War,
367-9, 371-4, 375-8; in contem-
porary world, 381

Gibraltar, acquired by Britain, 120-1,
122; besieged during American
Revolution, 160, 161; in Napole-
onic era, 196; and formation of En-
tente Cordiale, S04; in second
World War, 872r-3; mentioned, 2OT

Gladstone, William, and transforma-
tion of liberalism, 252-3, 256-8,
268; domestic reforms, 257-0, 260-
1; and Victoria, 260; and Ireland,
261-8, 286-7; imperial and foreign
policy, 267, 275, 276-8, 282-4,
285-6, 293; death, 287; influence,
299, 300, 312-3, 358; and House
of Lords, 308; mentioned, 218, 235,
269, 273

Gordon, Charles, and Egyptian Sudan,
283-4, 288

Grattan, Henry, and Irish autonomy,
163-4, 215

Great Contract, of James I, 55, 99

Greece, revolt against Turks, 210-2,
215; in peace settlement after 1919,
337; in second World War, 371,
373; contemporary Anglo-Bussiaa
friction in, 383

Grey, Charles, second Earl, and first
Reform Bill, 217-8, 221; mentioned,
226

IX

CD

105 198

RISE of England on tine inter-
national scene, England's long heyday of
imperial domination, and England's re-
cent decline as a \vorld po\ver are three
o the great facts of modern history. In
this superb book, of syn thesis, explanation,
and interpretation, \Villiarn. B. "Willcox
has examined the rial ing ideas, forces, and
human movements that lay behind these
three great facts.

Star of Empire sheds light in all direc-
tions over all parts of the world during
the past four hundred and sixty years. Not
a narrative history detailing battles or
petty dynastic struggles, it is an exciting
and consistently readable revelation of
the most important meanings that narra-
tive history must often overlook, or merely
irnply.

This boolc establishes \Villiam Ii.
\Villcox as one of the foremost younger
American historians.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK,
& PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. *

COPYRIGHT 1950 by William B. Willcox. All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the pub-
lisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be
printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of
America. Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland if Stewart Limited.

FIRST EDITION

TO

A E W

Whose Zest Extends to History

Star of Empire

Chapter One

SEEDS OF GREATNESS
1485-1603

I The Island Peoples

THE SIXTEENTH century was a turning point in the destiny of
the British peoples. In 1500 they were torn by dissension; Scot-
land was aligned with France, Wales was only partially subjugated
to England, and Ireland was almost entirely beyond the Pale. Eng-
land herself was still suffering from the aftermath of foreign defeat
and civil war. Her new dynasty was insecure upon the throne, and
her weight was slight in the scales of European power. In 1600
England and Scotland were being drawn together against their will,
England and Wales were at least a governmental unit, and the Eng-
lish had made strides on the long, grim path of conquering Ireland.
England was not yet recognized in Europe as a power of the first
rank, but she had made a place for herself as a champion of Prot-
estantism, the David to the Spanish Goliath. Her sailors had learned
the taste of the seven seas and had opened new horizons for the ad-
venturous, and she was on the verge of the greatest expansion of
power in history.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century no signs of this future
appeared. The British Isles were then little more than an appendage
off the coast of Europe and off a coast remote from the heart of
European life. The economy of the Continent was still focused upon
the Mediterranean, and Italy was still the trading center of Chris-
tendom. From Italian ports the routes of supply ran eastward, by
ship and caravan, to the riches of India and China; from Italy the
routes of distribution radiated through western Europe. The British

Chapter Three

THE TRIUMPH OF THE OLIGARCHY
1660-1763

I The Merry Monarch

THE RESTORATION brought Great Britain into touch with a
new world. Old problems and factions remained, but the key
figures at court were of a different stamp from the Puritans and Cav-
aliers. Exile, like war, leaves its mark. The returning migrs had
endured a decade of poverty and ostracism, of stillborn plots and
hopes, and they brought back with them a craving for the fleshpots
of security. Their public and private morals had been impaired as
gravely as their fortunes. They had acquired instead a polished
scepticism and an awareness of Europe.

The most patent aspect of this cosmopolitanism was their admira-
tion for Versailles. France was becoming the capital of European
manners and letters and the hub of European statecraft. The great
cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, had paved the way for the reign
of Louis XIV; when Mazarin died in 1661, Louis assumed control of
the best-integrated absolutism on the Continent. Spain had played
out her part, Austria and the Germanics were bled white by the
Thirty Years* War; France of the Sun King ordered, sophisticated,
unified was the dominant political fact of the west, and she cast
her spell over the English exiles. Her monarchy not only embodied,
with splendid trappings, the principle of prescriptive authority so
dear to their hearts; it also had a particular attraction for men who
had abandoned their country for the sake of their king. On their
loyalty to him they had staked everything, and his loyalties inevi-
tably colored theirs.

Chapter Four

THE DEFENSIVE AGAINST REVOLUTION
1763-1815

I Rationalism and Reform

salient characteristics of the late eighteenth century were
JL_ rationalism and revolution, and the two seem at first sight dis-
connected. The work of philosophers and physicists, from Newton
to Rousseau, had little apparent bearing on a Boston mob, on the
mushrooming of a Lancashire mill town, or on the guillotine in
Paris. In fact, however, there was a causal relationship. A -wide-
spread human faith in reason is itself a power for revolution, no mat-
ter how much the faith may be overlaid and concealed by its de-
structive results. This was never more fully demonstrated than in
the half-century between the Peace of Paris and the Peace of
Vienna.

The basic tenet of the rationalist was that the human mind had
the means of surmounting all problems, whether intellectual, politi-
cal, or physical. He believed that man and the universe operated by
laws that could eventually be comprehended, and hence that no ap-
parent mystery was too great to be pierced. Human relations might
be unhappy, human institutions sadly askew, but these results of stu-
pidity could be rectified by intelligence because man, far from be-
ing innately corrupt, was good at heart and therefore perfectible.
He -was kept from developing his goodness by the fetters of tradi-
tion binding "him to an unenlightened past, and these fetters could
be struck off by the force of reason, of what the philosophers called
the enlightenment. Whatever was illogical in man's inheritance in
his creeds, his political institutions, his ways of tilling the soil

145

Chapter Six

THE VICTORIAN TWILIGHT
1867-1906

I Major Themes

HE LAST three decades of the nineteenth century were a pe-
JL riod when change became more and more bewildering. What
the Victorians had accepted as the stately march of progress soon
lost its stateliness and quickened from a walk to a trot to a runaway
gallop; the route grew less familiar, the destination more obscure,
until the old self-confident optimism was shaken loose and lost by
the wayside. The Victorians came to realize that they were alone in
a hostile 'world. Their mood changed for a time to defiance, but the
sense of insecurity persisted. At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury they began to look for friends, and their search led them toward
a world war.

The development of external policy, foreign and imperial, was
only one among the major themes of the period. In the earlier dec-
ades it vied with two others: the domestic force of democracy un-
leashed by the second Reform Bill, and the inexorable problem of
Ireland. In the 1870's the external and domestic themes alternated
as the focus of politics. In the 1880's the Irish problem rose to a cli-
max that dominated everything else. But the question of Britain's
imperial security was inseparable from it, as always, and the chance
of satisfying the Irish was sacrificed to security; for the rest of the
century the Irish and domestic themes were subordinated to a cre-
scendo of imperialism. Then the force of democratic reform reap-
peared, imperialism changed character, and by 1906 a new age was
beginning.

255

Chapter Seven

GEORGIAN BRITAIN
1906-1932

I The Socialist Experiment

THE NEW Liberalism liad eight busy years before war engulfed
it. The same three themes of the earlier period reform, Ire-
land, and foreign affairs continued throughout the Liberal ascend-
ancy. First radical social legislation produced financial difficulties,
which led in turn to the greatest constitutional upheaval since 1832.
Next, before the dust had settled, Ireland was in a crisis that threat-
ened civil war. Then the crisis was postponed, but not resolved, by
the advent o a greater war. Meanwhile Britain's diplomacy had de-
veloped largely in the background; after 1906 its principles were
rarely a partisan issue, and their implications, discussed behind
closed doors in Whitehall, were not apparent to the public at large
until August 1914.

The general election of 1906 was an unprecedented landslide: the
Liberal Party acquired a large majority in the commons, and could
usually rely as well on the support of the Irish and Labour mem-
bers. In domestic policy the party leaders rode roughshod over the
Conservative opposition, until they had legislated a startling social
program and reshaped the constitution. By the time they tackled the
Irish problem they had dissipated their majority, and partisan ran-
cor had become dangerously acute.

The first spate of reform legislation, in the years 1906-9, was im-
pressive in scope. Parliament reformed itself by providing salaries
for members of the House of Commons, which thereby ceased to be
a rich mans club; it freed the trade unions from liability for strike

307

A NOTE ON THE

TYPE

IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET

L HE TEXT of this book is set in Caledonia, a Linotype face which
belongs to the family of printing types called "modern face" by print-
ers a term used to mark the change in style of type-letters that
occurred about 1800. Caledonia borders on the general design of
Scotch Modern, but is more freely drawn than that letter.

The book was composed, printed, and bound by The Plimpton
Press, Norwood, Massachusetts. The typography and binding design
are by W. A. Diviggins.